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

[Dali Llama]

So only 5 ACC teams outperformed their rankings, and none by a big margin. 10 underperformed, several by a huge margin. Maybe ACC recruits are overrated.

It's important to note Pitt, Cuse, Louisville, and Notre Dame were not in the ACC for this entire time period.

By the way, comparing Pitt and TCU on the graph to where those teams are now, Jamie Dixon might be a good coach. I don't know.

 

[cville deac]

Bz was bad, but man ... Brian Gregory might have actually been worse (though less detestable as a person). Jesus.

Put down the pipe, GT fan. Never believe the pipe. Gregory won twice as many games as he lost at Dayton, had a slight losing record at GT and got himself another head coaching gig already. He must have won an ACC conference road game somewhere along the way and never referred to a tilt with winless BC as the Super Bowl. He was just in over his head at a major and is back where he belongs at a mid major. And if you make another baseless assertion like this, I'm gonna ask LK to ban you. See, you seem reasonable most of the time, and then you come out with a whopper like this. This must be why vadtoy doesn't talk to you about her job.

 

[Wakeforest22890]

A team can fare poorly in their conference (Wake relative to the ACC when [Redacted] was the coach) and be sort of bad or they can be really bad. To say that Wake should've been bad because of our players when [Redacted] was here totally ignores that we weren't just bad in the ACC, we were bad overall. I mean we finished a year outside the top 200 in the country. That's vastly underachieving with the recruits we had no matter how you look at it.

There's a huge gap between being 75th-100th in KP and 200+

 

[vadimivich]

Put down the pipe, GT fan. Never believe the pipe. Gregory won twice as many games as he lost at Dayton, had a slight losing record at GT and got himself another head coaching gig already. He must have won an ACC conference road game somewhere along the way and never referred to a tilt with winless BC as the Super Bowl. He was just in over his head at a major and is back where he belongs at a mid major. And if you make another baseless assertion like this, I'm gonna ask LK to ban you. See, you seem reasonable most of the time, and then you come out with a whopper like this. This must be why vadtoy doesn't talk to you about her job.

Gregory was 27-61 (.307) in ACC play, never finished better than 9th. [Redacted] went 17-51 (.250) and never finished better than 9th. Gregory also inherited some real talent from Hewitt and he left the roster completely bare (8 of his 27 wins came in his final season when he gave up on any high school recruits and brought in a bunch of one season grad transfers trying to save his job - he was almost exactly the same record as [Redacted] going into that year at 19-51 in ACC play) to the point that GT couldn't even field a starting lineup of scholarship players the season after.

Gregory was utterly awful as a head coach. In the [Redacted] zone, at least. As a human being he's fucking Coach K compared to [Redacted] though, no question about that. And he never insulted our fans, insulted the university, etc ... [Redacted] stands on his own in ACC history for that level of shit baggery. Gregory was just run of the mill terrible as a coach.

Anyways, the point I was trying to make was that GT has wasted a gobstopping amount of talent the past decade as this graph shows (NCSU too, Jesus). Gregory was a big part of that, but Hewitt and Pastner bear their share of the blame as well.

 

[OldGoldBeard]

Put down the pipe, GT fan. Never believe the pipe. Gregory won twice as many games as he lost at Dayton, had a slight losing record at GT and got himself another head coaching gig already. He must have won an ACC conference road game somewhere along the way and never referred to a tilt with winless BC as the Super Bowl. He was just in over his head at a major and is back where he belongs at a mid major. And if you make another baseless assertion like this, I'm gonna ask LK to ban you. See, you seem reasonable most of the time, and then you come out with a whopper like this. This must be why vadtoy doesn't talk to you about her job.

Gregory had a better KenPom ranking in four of his five seasons (51, 86, 114, 104 2013-2016, 174 in 2012) than Bzz had in his best year at Wake (117 in 2014, 137, 211, 259 2011-2013). I don't know whom else he brought in, but Gregory at least landed an All-ACC player in Lammers. Bzdoofus was here for four seasons, and the best we got were a couple of All-ACC Honorable Mention campaigns from CMM and Devin Thomas

 

[DCDeac]

Pretty clear evidence that recruiting rankings matter.

This. You're the most overperforming team in the ACC? Congratulations, you're Clemson and you suck ass. Then half the ACC is in the underperforming list.

That swing seems like it would indicate the weighting is off. If you're in the ACC with a bunch of overachieving 3 stars, you're still getting murdered by 5 star Duke and UNC kids. The St. Mary's and Northern Iowa's of college basketball don't have that problem. Or put another way, being 50 spots behind Kentucky isn't anywhere close to being the same as 50 spots behind Rutgers or whatever.

Be a decent coach, have a solid system, keep kids in school - but mainly have a high 4 or 5 star starter or two on your squad every year. The workman's path to being good - we can't all be Wisconsin. And if you try to be, you can end up getting [name redacted]'d.

 

[RJKarl]

Over the past decade 247's rankings have often been wildly different than other national ratings.

 

[vadimivich]

Gregory had a better KenPom ranking in four of his five seasons (51, 86, 114, 104 2013-2016, 174 in 2012) than Bzz had in his best year at Wake (117 in 2014, 137, 211, 259 2011-2013). I don't know whom else he brought in, but Gregory at least landed an All-ACC player in Lammers. Bzdoofus was here for four seasons, and the best we got were a couple of All-ACC Honorable Mention campaigns from CMM and Devin Thomas

True, Jesus that's ugly to read. I feel like WFU/GT/NCSU should just start our own underachievers section of the ACC where we can battle it out to win some kid's table prize or something.

 

[cheeseheads12]

Lost in your comparison of Bz and Gregory is margin of defeat. Bz was rarely competitive. It was usually a guarantee that we’d lose by 15+ in most road games. I swear every time I watched GT they were competitive. They lost a ridiculous amount of games by 5 or less. No comparison. Bz is GOAT...worst coach that is!

 

[vadimivich]

btw - I copied this post over to a GT board, just because it's a fantastic visual representation and the work putting together is appreciated (though it paints a bleak picture)

 

[Rafi]

Pretty clear evidence that recruiting rankings matter.

Really? It looks quite scattered to me. That's why I was wondering about the strength of correlation. There is certainly a trend, but it looks like the top 4-10 teams really drive that.

 

[cville deac]

Gregory had a better KenPom ranking in four of his five seasons (51, 86, 114, 104 2013-2016, 174 in 2012) than Bzz had in his best year at Wake (117 in 2014, 137, 211, 259 2011-2013). I don't know whom else he brought in, but Gregory at least landed an All-ACC player in Lammers. Bzdoofus was here for four seasons, and the best we got were a couple of All-ACC Honorable Mention campaigns from CMM and Devin Thomas

This. Now please ban that effin' foreigner Vad. He has completely lost all perspective. May vadtoy never talk to him again.

 

[vadimivich]

This. Now please ban that effin' foreigner Vad. He has completely lost all perspective. May vadtoy never talk to him again.

Ok, I gotta admit - I didn't know [Redacted] teams were THAT bad beyond their records. Gregory just lost games, he didn't get blowed the fuck out as often as though KP #s for Bz show.

 

[PhDeac]

Really? It looks quite scattered to me. That's why I was wondering about the strength of correlation. There is certainly a trend, but it looks like the top 4-10 teams really drive that.

What's scattered? All but a small percentage of schools are hugging the trendline. Look at it vertically and most schools are within +/-15 of their recruiting ranks. Given all the built-in variance that makes it tough to correlate recruiting and on-court production (i.e. early entrants, transfers, coaching, coaching changes, etc), that's really good.

 

[Rafi]

What's scattered? All but a small percentage of schools are hugging the trendline. Look at it vertically and most schools are within +/-15 of their recruiting ranks. Given all the built-in variance that makes it tough to correlate recruiting and on-court production (i.e. early entrants, transfers, coaching, coaching changes, etc), that's really good.

It looks to me like there are 40 or so teams for which recruiting really made little difference in driving their results. That's why I'm interesting to see the r and the r without the top 4-10 teams. There's no doubt a trend, but I'm interested to see how strong.

 

[RJKarl]

We're losses against teams with more talent weighted? Were losses against teams with better recruits weighted?

Why did you go back 12-13 years rather than a decade?

 

[DeacHead]

We're losses against teams with more talent weighted? Were losses against teams with better recruits weighted?

Why did you go back 12-13 years rather than a decade?

Do your own statistical analysis if you've got a more robust methodology.

As for me, I say GJ Dali and Hello.

 

[Deac83]

Just shocking to see that the dooks and UNCs recruit at the top level and perform at the top level. Yes our ranking stinks but I'd be more upset if I was GT or State who may have gotten better performance but by under performing they wasted much more opportunity. If Wake had performed to it's rankings we are an NIT/NCAA bubble team (sure we'd all take that at this point but

What this does show is that we are in a conference that has at least 7 teams out recruiting us. We can complain about DM's in game coaching but it's a huge up hill battle if he doesn't move the recruiting needle first.

 

[Wakeforest22890]

We're losses against teams with more talent weighted? Were losses against teams with better recruits weighted?

Why did you go back 12-13 years rather than a decade?

The "weighting" is the KP rating at the end of the year which already controls for losses against teams with more/less talent (to the extent that talent exists as a valid proxy for how good a team is). He doesn't go back "12-13 years" he goes from 2006-07 to 2016-17

 

[pourdeac]

Really? It looks quite scattered to me. That's why I was wondering about the strength of correlation. There is certainly a trend, but it looks like the top 4-10 teams really drive that.

Don't you mean the top AND the bottom teams? The correlation is basically a line between the two extremes, which makes sense. The best players are the best players leading to wins, and the worst ones are bad leading to lot of losses. I'm not sure there's a correlation out side of the extremes though.