How much value (in terms of recruiting success) are we getting from our staff?

I think most people here agree that recruiting is one of, if not the, major hurdle that our program has been unable to overcome in the past 10-20 years. This has been attributed to a variety of reasons - not enough donations, not enough winning, challenges with the location, etc. A couple days ago in one of the coaching threads, outoftowner5 made this comment:

Again, it's not just a budget thing. We need to make better staffing decisions, and get wiser with the money we have.

I never thought that the problem wasn't who we could afford to hire, but how we were spending the money we had. Since I just finished finals, I decided to spend a couple hours putting this data together. My goal was to determine:

  1. Is our staff underachieving in recruiting given their salary?
  2. Of our recruiting rivals, who is getting the most 'bang for the buck?'

This spreadsheet contains all the data I will reference throughout this entire piece.

Methodology:
I wanted to compare Virginia Tech's staff to other 'geographic recruiting rivals.' Given that our recruiting footprint is roughly anywhere on the east coast between Atlanta and Pennsylvania, I included 14 P5 school that are either located within or frequently recruit this area:

  • Clemson
  • Duke
  • Georgia
  • Georgia Tech
  • NC State
  • UNC
  • Wake Forest
  • Pitt
  • Penn State
  • South Carolina
  • Tennessee
  • Maryland
  • UVA
  • WVU

All information on salary and staff is from this recently posted USA Today article. I think it's mostly up to date with the latest coaching changes (UNC and UMD staffs looked correct), but I may have overlooked something.

Next, I needed a way to figure out how well each assistant at each of these 15 teams (14 rivals + VT) recruits. To do this, I used 247's Coach Composite Rankings. I decided that I would rank each assistant coach on these 15 teams by calculating their 3-year average 247 Recruiting Point total for years 2015-2017. I figured a 3 year average would be a small enough sample that only relevant data would be included, but also large enough that any unusual data points would be obvious. I chose 2015-2017 because I wanted the results to be based on recruits who signed an LOI, not commitments.

Disclaimer/Assumptions/Callouts:
Some things to keep in mind while reading below comments on any trends I noticed, or when forming your own conclusions:

  • Obviously, this is a somewhat crude analysis that doesn't account for or normalize staff changes, depth chart, school recruiting resources, etc. I literally just found the staff and salary information for all assistants at these 15 schools, and matched that up with each coach's 3 year recruiting history (regardless of what school they were at).
  • The private/semi-private schools on this list (PSU, Pitt, Duke, Wake) do not disclose (much) salary information, so this analysis is somewhat incomplete.
  • There are many instances of a coach having 0 recruiting points for a given year - that means that 247 didn't rank the coach in their Composite Coach Rankings for that year. There could be a number of reason why this happened (coach didn't land any (noteworthy) recruits, coach was in a non-recruiting role that year, coach was a headcoach that year, coach was in between jobs, etc). Obviously, this data skews my findings. I'm open to recalculating based on some other method if someone has a suggestion (and they're willing to redo the tables for me, b/c that part was a pain in the ass!)
  • This analysis attributes all results to the 'lead recruiter' (who typically is NOT a head coach)
  • This analysis obviously doesn't factor in on the field coaching skills, it purely focuses on recruiting results from 2015-2017.

Who are the best recruiters at our geographic rivals?
These are the top 20 recruiters (of these 15 schools) from 2015-2017:

3 Year Coach Composite Ranking School Coach 2018 Base Salary ($) 3 Year Coach Composite Points Avg
1 Clemson Brent Venables 2200000 66.41
2 Clemson Jeff Scott 850000 65.59
3 UNC Tommy Thigpen 405000 63.9
4 Tennessee Chris Rumph 805000 62.69
5 Tennessee Kevin Sherrer 705000 62.11
6 UNC Robert Gillespie 382000 60.13
7 Georgia Sam Pittman 825000 60.12
8 Georgia James Coley 850000 56.92
9 South Carolina Travaris Robinson 1200000 56.59
10 Penn State Terry M. Smith N/A 55.95
11 Georgia Scott Fountain 300000 54.32
12 Tennessee Tracy Rocker 505000 54.03
13 South Carolina Bryan McClendon 650000 52.21
14 Tennessee Charles Kelly 330000 51.46
15 WVU Joe Wickline 501000 50.36
16 UNC Chris Kapilovic 450000 49.71
17 Clemson Tony Elliott 875000 47.92
18 Duke Derek Jones N/A 47.48
19 Penn State Sean Spencer N/A 47.28
20 VT Zohn Burden 280000 47.04

Here is each school ranked based on the 3 year performance of their current staff:
(please note that individuals currently on the staff may not have been their three years ago).

School 3 Year Coach Composite Points School Avg
Georgia 39.97
UNC 29.19
Tennessee 29.14
Penn State 28.41
Clemson 28.08
South Carolina 25.54
VT 24.43
Pitt 23.97
Duke 22.64
WVU 18.91
NC State 17.66
UMD 16.65
Georgia Tech 11.45
Wake Forest 10.13
UVA 9.22

And here is how each school is trending from 2015-2017 based on the performance of their current staff:
(again, please note that individuals currently on the staff may not have been their three years ago).

School 3 Year Trend
Georgia 107.12
Pitt 49.83
VT 48.73
South Carolina 41.79
UMD 37.11
Tennessee 20.44
Duke 17.74
NC State 9.31
Georgia Tech 8.57
WVU 7.73
UVA -6.85
Penn State -7.69
UNC -28.83
Clemson -30.30
Wake Forest -42.30

Which recruiters offer the 'bang for the buck' to their school?
These are the Top 20 'value' recruiters from (of these 15 schools) from 2015-2017:

3 Year Coach Composite Ranking School Coach 2018 Base Salary ($) 3 Year Coach Composite Points Avg Price per Recruiting Point ($/point)
11 Georgia Scott Fountain 300000 54.32 5522
20 VT Zohn Burden 280000 47.04 5952
30 UMD Aazaar Abdul-Rahim 250000 41.35 6046
25 VT Charley Wiles 280000 45.4 6167
52 UVA Marques Hagans 175000 27.61 6338
3 UNC Tommy Thigpen 405000 63.9 6338
6 UNC Robert Gillespie 382000 60.13 6353
14 Tennessee Charles Kelly 330000 51.46 6413
32 UNC Deke Adams 300000 40.24 7455
28 NC State Des Kitchings 324480 42.93 7558
57 NC State Ted Roof 200000 25.61 7809
42 WVU Matt Caponi 251000 30.96 8107
36 Georgia Glenn Schumann 325000 37.82 8593
16 UNC Chris Kapilovic 450000 49.71 9053
70 UNC Keith Heckendorf 195000 21.3 9153
46 VT Brian Mitchell 280000 30.14 9291
47 VT Holmon Wiggins 280000 30.01 9329
12 Tennessee Tracy Rocker 505000 54.03 9346
43 Georgia Tech Andy McCollum 296089 30.8 9613
15 WVU Joe Wickline 501000 50.36 9949

And here is each school ranked based on overall staff value:

School 3 Year Average Coach Composite Ranking for School Recruiting Points per $100000
UNC 63.00 8.50
VT 66.80 7.56
Georgia 36.80 7.40
Tennessee 65.90 5.49
NC State 83.40 5.47
UMD 89.20 5.24
WVU 82.70 5.15
South Carolina 68.40 4.74
Georgia Tech 100.00 3.99
Clemson 69.30 3.72
UVA 105.20 3.33
Duke 73.50 N/A
Penn State 63.00 N/A
Pitt 65.80 N/A
Wake Forest 104.18 N/A

Answering My Questions

  1. Is our staff underachieving in recruiting given their salary?

    I think we're achieving as expected given our coaches' salaries, as compared to our geographic rivals. Of the rival schools providing salary data, VT is getting the second best recruiting bang for the buck. Again, Pitt and PSU do not report salary data, and I wouldn't be surprised if they both ranked above us. Whatever the case, I think we can confidently say that VT is in the top third in terms of 'bang for the buck' compared to our geographic recruiting rivals.

    Unfortunately, we must acknowledge that VT has middle of the pack in terms of quality of recruiter (ignore each recruiter's cost). If we want to spin this somewhat optimistically, we could note that the 2015 signing class is really bringing down our numbers, and we are trending up faster than all but two other schools (UGA, who is killing it, and Pitt, who is trending pretty similar to VT). This could be explained by the fact that a lot of the current staff was either at Memphis (G5 school, thus more difficult to recruit at), or at VT dealing with negative recruiting around Beamer's inevitable retirement. That said, a lot of schools on this list probably have an off year for similar reasons, so I imagine that it all comes out in the wash.

    Looking at a couple of individual achievements...

    • Zohn (#2 overall in this measure!!!) and Wiles both place in the top 5 of most cost effective assistants among our recruiting rivals who report salary information, with Mitchell and Wiggins also in the top 25.
    • In the thread focusing on UMD hires, there was talk about why we haven't poached Aazaar Abdul-Rahim from UMD and bring him to Blacksburg - I can only speculate and share rumors regarding why, but it's clear that AAR can recruit. He's the #3 coach overall in terms of value, and that's including the 2015 season where 247 gave him zero recruiting points. If we remove that year, he jumps to #6 overall and #1 for the value.
    • Foster's recruiting is particularly of interest, and has really improved from 2015-2017. In 2017, he was the 81st best recruiter among our geographic rivals' current staff. In 2017, he was 23rd. As I said previously, this can be attributed to a lot of things - I'm sure it was tough recruiting kids to VT at the Beamer era, but I'm also wondering if he got 'lucky' in 2017; meaning that there just happened to be a handful of high profile recruits in his region that year.
  2. Of our recruiting rivals, who is getting the most 'bang for the buck?'

    UNC's staff is scary from a recruiting standpoint. They have two top-10 recruiters, both of whom are also in the top 10 in bang for the buck. They have 5 total coaches who are top 20 value recruiters. That said, some of their staff's recruiting success might be from recruiting at 'name brand' schools like Tennessee, Texas, etc, and it is to be determined if they can recruit at a similar level at UNC. It will be interesting to see how much of their recruiting success is due to the school's brand versus their individual talent as a recruiter. My guess - these guys will improve UNC's recruiting class, and be a major annoyance for VT, but won't land top 10 classes. There's just too much competition in this part of the country.

    Also worth noting that these measures tell us that Clemson is overpaying their coaches based on how they recruit (but that's another debate).

EDIT #1:
Here's info for the VT coaching staff, ordered by each coach's 'value':

3 Year Coach Composite Ranking School Coach 2018 Base Salary 3 Year Coach Composite Points Avg Price per Recruiting point Recruiting Points per $100000
20 VT Zohn Burden $280,000 47.04 $5,952 16.8
25 VT Charley Wiles $280,000 45.4 $6,167 16.21
46 VT Brian Mitchell $280,000 30.14 $9,291 10.76
47 VT Holmon Wiggins $280,000 30.01 $9,329 10.72
79 VT Vance Vice $280,000 19.06 $14,690 6.81
51 VT James Shibest $445,000 28.18 $15,793 6.33
111 VT Tyrone Nix $200,000 6.59 $30,334 3.3
44 VT Bud Foster $975,000 30.6 $31,866 3.14
110 VT Brad Cornelsen $490,000 7.33 $66,879 1.5
135 VT Adam Lechtenberg $175,000 0 N/A 0
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