The three star conundrum

(I hope everyone had a merry Christmas and enjoyed some time away from the internet. I did. I’ll keep everybody posted with breaking news and some (hopefully) interesting articles, before getting things cranked back up to full-speed next week.)

As usual, the Wall Street Journal came up with something interesting. Their blog, The Count, tackled the world of college football recruiting, and after analyzing the 1,496 bowl-game starters found that having a highly-rated recruiting class didn’t always correlate to success on the field.

From The Count:

When USC signed every prized football recruit west of the Mississippi over the past five years, most fans expected national titles every season. Instead, the Trojans are playing in something called the Emerald Bowl on Saturday.

If bowl season teaches fans anything, it’s that getting top recruits doesn’t guarantee success. In this year’s 34 bowls, half of the participating teams didn’t have a single starter in their final regular-season game that was considered a top-100 prospect in high school, according to recruiting Web site Rivals.com. The Count analyzed 1,496 bowl-game starters and found that just 8.4% of them were top-100 recruits.

USC starts 13 top prospects--most among all bowl teams. By contrast, its opponent Saturday, Boston College, didn’t start a single top-100 prospect in its final regular-season game. In the title game, Texas starts nine top prospects and Alabama only has three, yet Alabama is a 4-point favorite. Both teams are led by players (Colt McCoy and Heisman winner Mark Ingram) who weren’t top-100 prospects in high school. This trend continues in the Rose Bowl, where underdog Ohio State has eight top prospects compared to Oregon’s zero. Then there’s the Fiesta Bowl, featuring undefeated TCU and Boise State. Neither team starts a top recruit.

Notre Dame fans of all people know that winning recruiting titles doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to win big on the football field. But the Journal’s statistical breakdown is certainly lacking in the kind of depth you’d want if you -- well, you know -- want to make a good point.

Andy Staples over at SI.com beat me to the punch with an intelligent counterpoint to the Journal article.

I’ll let him take it from here:

Author David Biderman analyzed this year’s 1,496 bowl starters and their teams’ bowl destinations and concluded that recruiting highly ranked players doesn’t necessarily help teams reach BCS bowls. Unfortunately, the fact Biderman pegged the story on -- that USC, with a multitude of starters who were ranked in the Rivals.com top 100, is playing in the Emerald Bowl against a Boston College team that has no starters who were ranked in the Rivals100 -- turned a blind eye to some critical data. Biderman never mentioned that USC, with players who are still on this year’s roster, won the Pac-10 and played in a BCS bowl each of the past three years. Biderman didn’t do anything wrong other than use too small a sample size.

Staples enhanced Biderman’s work and drew some pretty interesting conclusions of his own. Working with the raw data and cataloging it to accurately account for a recruit’s contributions, Staples found a pretty strong correlation between Top 100 signees and BCS Bowls.

“Over the last four seasons, the top four stockpilers of Rivals100 talent have combined to earn nine BCS bowl berths,” Staples concluded.

Those four teams? USC, Texas, Florida, and... Notre Dame.

For those that were clamoring for Charlie Weis’ ouster, that fact might have been your most effective when making the argument to dispose of the former coach.

Staples himself states the case pretty well:

The most curious case is Notre Dame (24 signees), which played in a BCS bowl in 2006 but has fallen off in recent years. If there ever was a program ripe to have its recruits overrated, it’s Notre Dame. The Fighting Irish have a huge, passionate fan bases with plenty of members more than happy to fork over $9.95 a month to read a treasure trove of recruiting news. So it’s good for business to keep the rankings high.

That still doesn’t explain one fact. The main reason why Notre Dame recruits are ranked so high is that they also were pursued by other elite programs. So either the other schools’ coaches evaluated the players incorrectly, or the players aren’t reaching their maximum potential.

For the past two seasons, a chicken-egg argument raged as to whether Charlie Weis was coaching overhyped, poorly evaluated recruits or whether Weis had failed to develop accurately rated recruits. Notre Dame’s 2009 team featured 11 starters ranked in the top 100 as recruits. With the exception of receiver Golden Tate -- ranked No. 101 in the class of 2007 -- the group included Notre Dame’s best players. The players came in ranked higher than their teammates, and they turned out to be more talented than their teammates. They just couldn’t beat other teams outside the closed system that was the Notre Dame practice field. That speaks to player development.

In other words, the data suggest athletic director Jack Swarbrick made the correct choice when he fired Weis.

I’ve already talked about the effects that the highly-touted class of 2006 had in determining Charlie Weis’ fate as head coach. But I’d make the argument that what killed Charlie Weis wasn’t the lack of development in his top-rated players, but his inability to get any contributions out of the players that weren’t ranked in the Top 100.

We can talk about players like Konrad Reuland, Demetrius Jones, and James Aldridge, highly touted recruits that never had the careers at Notre Dame that were hoped for, but what killed Notre Dame these past five seasons is the consistent inability to get three-star prospects to become bona fide studs.

Since 2005, the Irish haven’t been able to get significant contributions from three-star recruits. For every player like David Bruton or Kyle McCarthy, there have been far too many players like Kallen Wade and Morrice Richardson, three-star recruits that had intriguing potential and offers from elite football programs that never made the contributions people hoped for the Irish. Since the ’05 season, only Bruton, McCarthy, Paul Duncan, and Ian Williams have turned into solid starters* after being three-star recruits, which shows both the inability of the Irish to unearth hidden gems and the recruiting services to accurately rate mid-level prospects that get Notre Dame offers. This could partially explaining what Staples was talking about when discussing the curious case of the Irish. It’s also a great illustration of the “Lemming effect,” which in addition to meaning a “doomed conformist” also could be defined as the addition of a recruiting star thanks to the propping up of Irish recruits for the betterment of business by national recruiting experts like Tom Lemming.

(* I realize the term solid starters is incredibly subjective, and I could very easily remove Paul Duncan and Ian Williams from this category, and probably add Sergio Brown if I wanted to go the other way.)

USC, Florida, and Texas are clearing taking advantage of their recruiting spoils, and the point of this isn’t to diminish the returns they receive from their blue-chip recruits. But all three schools have had their success buoyed by overlooked recruits that turned into gigantic contributors. USC’s recruiting classes are chalked full of elite prospects, but players like Clay Matthews came from nowhere to become All-Americans. Florida had below-the-radar recruits like Louis Murphy and Brandon James become All-SEC performers. Texas unearthed a little known quarterback named Colt McCoy. While all three schools would’ve been alright without these guys, they wouldn’t have seen the success that they did over the past four or five seasons without them.

Comparing Notre Dame to three teams that have inhabited the upper-stratosphere of college football for the past five seasons isn’t necessarily fair to the Irish. But even if you take a school like Wisconsin, a team usually in the top three or four of the Big Ten, they’ve done a much better job than the Irish finding players. Those recruits may not get page-views for websites, but they’ve helped the Badgers win a lot of games. Wisconsin has only had two players in the Rivals Top 100 over the past three seasons, but they’ve produced three-star starters like Gabe Carimi, who projects to be a first-day NFL draft pick and freshman Chris Borland, who came to the Badgers with no other scholarship offers, and finished the season as the Big Ten Freshman of the Year.

As Brian Kelly begins to lay the groundwork for his football team, his recruiting strategy may take him out of the good graces of recruitniks everywhere. (Only a week into the job and his signing of mid-level prospect Austin Collinsworth already has Irish fans wondering if Kelly understands recruiting.) But for Kelly to succeed, he’ll have to not only reel in players on the top of recruiting boards everywhere, but accurately predict which guys in the middle will become capable college football players. The good news for Irish fans is that Kelly has already shown in his two stops before South Bend that he’s been able to win with the type of player that Weis couldn’t accurately find. If Kelly can succeed in wooing the elite recruits that Weis was able to reel in, the Irish might finally be in business.