Teams are targeting big players who can run. Syracuse is not mentioned but is clearly on top of this as well...
A numbers-based philosophy is slowly seeping into the pores of college football.
247sports.com
Pretty interesting article particularly in terms of some of the athleticism-based scores they are using. I had a few thoughts while reading it:
1) Instead of leading with the anecdote about Rhule at Temple, I almost feel like it should have been a coach from even further back. I mean, in the 90s a lot of recruiting was assembling a wide network of high school coaches and going from there. By the time Rhule came along the Internet with films all over the place was already pretty much in full force. Even that changed the game massively.
2) Thought it was interesting that like 70% of Baylor's recruits camped there at one point or another. Makes sense and helps, IMO, lend a bit more credibility to the recruits we've signed so far despite their lack of exciting offer sheets or star levels.
3) I wonder if calling it an analytics revolution is a bit strong. I mean, it's really more about the communication advances that give coaches not only more accurate metrics on players but allow them to far more easily canvas a much larger geography. And the metrics themselves, I would argue, haven't changed
that much. I mean, was there ever a time that a program outside the blue blood circle wasn't trying to find as many kids with size and speed as humanly possible? I get that maybe they don't go by film nearly as much but I think folks still ideally want size and speed everywhere and are willing to live without the size if they have to as long as there is big time speed/quickness.
4) Just another comment on the star system -- b/c I can't help myself -- I find it really funny that the difference between a low-end recruit who may never contribute (5.2) and a high-end franchise player (6.1) is .9 on the scale. These services/sites essentially set themselves up such that they can basically throw all but the top 250 and maybe a collection of players at the very lowest end in essentially the same pool -- basically somewhere between 5.4 and 5.8 or so (and I know that's just rivals but it works about the same at the other sites). That's not by accident, IMO, b/c it allows them to sort of infer that most good two-stars and all three stars are almost equal. That's the major flaw in these systems, IMO. The question isn't how many stars you have, per se, it's did you sign Jay Bromley (a two-star from a non-traditional football rich area, with no offers and absolutely zero fanfare but tremendous size and athleticism) or Lavar Lobdell (a 4-star that we were super excited to sign but wound up offering the program essentially nothing)? That's a question, for the most part, the services can't tell us.
