What Have You Done for Us Lately?

One of the writers at the Sports Economist blog talks a little about a recent paper he published that tries to rank the coaches of the Football Bowl Subdivision in the NCAA (formerly and more sensibly known as "Division 1.")

Joel Maxcy took data rating recruiting classes and how well each coach used his talent compared with his peers. He used the Rivals.com class rankings to gauge the quality of a coach's recruits. Maxcy hints at several interesting findings about where coaches who recruit well wind up placing in overall success, and how overall success matches up with recruiting. Since the paper was published in an academic journal, it's not available online for free (an economist, after all, knows that abtsract value and online "attaboys" may be very nice, but they don't put beans on the table).

As might be expected, most of the coaches who succeed in the win-loss arena are also successes at recruiting top talent. Some successful coaches, though, who run their own particular style of game, seek out recruits who fit their program, whether those recruits are blue chip or not. It sounds pretty interesting, but I'm not sure about interesting enough to sacrifice some of the beans on my table to take a full peek.

Maxcy says one clear finding is that a coach's ability to recruit top talent diminishes over time and as it does, so does his overall success rate, which will eventually bring about dismissal. When undergraduate careers may end after a couple of years and the only people on campus who remember your national champion trophies are the janitors who dust them, then you're got a constant pressure to produce now.

The recruiting falloff makes sense in non-economic terms too. I've read interviews with retired NCAA coaches who suggest that as they got older, their ability to reach out and connect with 18-year-olds lessened, which probably hampered their recruiting unless they had good staff doing most of the relation-building and groundwork.

After all, a guy who spent his high school years cruising the drag in his 409 or trying to decipher the deepest meaning of Dark Side of the Moon or even rocking a stunning mullet to "Bang Your Head (Metal Health)" might have a hard time connecting to a kid who thinks knowing what name to call Sean Combs means you're "old school."