A Look at Team Recruiting vs. On-Court Success in Last Decade of College Basketball

[CharlotteDeac1]

OK, I could do that at some point. I would just have to make two cuts instead of one. Which classes do you suggest be excluded from the recruiting data? Just the 2010 class (that only played in the 2011 through 2014 seasons, which will be excluded from the on-success measure)? Or the 2009/2011 classes as well (which would have played for only one year of the on-court performance captured)?

ETA: Obviously this doesn't apply to transfers/redshirts.

Good question. I don't know if it would be fair to Manning to include his first two years as coach at the beginning of a full-scale rebuild with players he didn't recruit getting major minutes. I'm open to suggestions on what others think is fair.
In the data I gathered I decided to count the recruiting rankings leading up to the 2016 season from 2014 because Danny recruited those guys. Danny recruited all the players on our team now but it is tougher to judge because of two huge losses due to unexpected attrition.

 

[Rafi]

Rafi, to answer your question, the correlation between average player ranking (after dropping the bottom 15%) for all the teams I collected data on and sum of AdjEM is -0.773.

Running a simple OLS regression, the adjusted R-squared is 0.5953.

But yeah, as I said yesterday, it was more challenging collecting recruiting data on some of the lower-level teams included in these numbers.

Thanks so much for running that. As you note, there are challenges with this data, but it appears the association between recruiting ranking and kenpom ranking is modest, and a lot of it is driven by the top 4-10 schools.

 

[Rafi]

Duplicate post.

 

[Milhouse]

roger sends

 

[Strickland33]

Good question. I don't know if it would be fair to Manning to include his first two years as coach at the beginning of a full-scale rebuild with players he didn't recruit getting major minutes. I'm open to suggestions on what others think is fair.
In the data I gathered I decided to count the recruiting rankings leading up to the 2016 season from 2014 because Danny recruited those guys. Danny recruited all the players on our team now but it is tougher to judge because of two huge losses due to unexpected attrition.

Great coaches have to account for "huge losses" and "unexpected attrition" every year. It's Danny's team now and he's responsible for the good and the bad. We had the pieces to be a pretty good perimeter team this year and have majorly underachieved. Our lack of post depth has been less of an issue than our inconsistent perimeter play, IMO.

 

[RJKarl]

Great coaches have to account for "huge losses" and "unexpected attrition" every year. It's Danny's team now and he's responsible for the good and the bad. We had the pieces to be a pretty good perimeter team this year and have majorly underachieved. Our lack of post depth has been less of an issue than our inconsistent perimeter play, IMO.

Great coaches get hints about losing the players and usually have time to recruit replacements. Last year, Danny had a double whammy. We had no reason to recruit a PF starting in 2016 (when the cycle really starts hitting full speed). There was no rational indication that JC would blow up like he did and Dinos seemed to be coming back for his degree. If you are a Top 100 PF, you don't want to come to a place where you are likely to be #3 on the depth chart. It's not just that we were losing but how late the knowledge of upcoming losses happened.

We have played a bad schedule. With even a mediocre front court, we should be out rebounding our opponents by a lot more than 2/game. Further, Doral is averaging 9.9 ppg and no other big is averaging as many as 6 ppg. Our interior D has improved over the past couple of games, but for the first dozen games it was bad.

Our perimeter D has been terrible. The extremely mediocre opposition is shooting 39/4% on threes and driving by some of our guards like they are statues. When we play three guards, at least two will be undersized making shooting over them easy.

Chaundee is taking a little more time to become a college player than most expected. This has hurt.

Even if our guards played very well, we were always going to get murdered on the boards unless at least two interior players made huge leaps in production.

I'm not saying we shouldn't have won more games. We should have.

but look at the whole story, IMO.

 

[CharlotteDeac1]

Great coaches have to account for "huge losses" and "unexpected attrition" every year. It's Danny's team now and he's responsible for the good and the bad. We had the pieces to be a pretty good perimeter team this year and have majorly underachieved. Our lack of post depth has been less of an issue than our inconsistent perimeter play, IMO.

I agree with the first part but strongly consider this year’s situation to be an extreme one for Danny for a couple reasons.

First, John Collins was expected and could’ve been “replaced” (replaced in quotations because not replacing his production obviously) because of him leaving to go to the draft. Dinos left so late it was after the grad transfer market was depleted - so either we would’ve known we need another big or would’ve been able to start Dinos next to Doral. That’s a huge difference to start the year.

Second, I’m not sure how many coaches can replace a first round pick and another professional basketball player in the same year that are in the middle (or tail end hopefully) of a complete rebuild. That seems like an incredibly difficult thing to do.

Also, outside our first 4-5 games I don’t think our perimeter play has been lacking. Those first games it was really bad but has greatly improved (outside Crawford’s outlier bad game against Tennessee).