I was reading the fivethirtyeight article today about the early 2000's Miami team and how immensely talented they were. One of the external links in the article talked about recruiting and how programs perform relative to their expectations. The article itself is from the beginning of last season, but I think its interesting nonetheless. If it was posted here last year I apologize.
http://www.footballstudyhall.com/2013/8/19/4635732/college-football-appa...
I think the article gives credence to a couple points that some Tech fans have been making about our success over the decade. First of all it does appear that Tech has been punching above its weight, having positive (or non-negative) results every year of the study. As addressed in the article, part of their measure of coaching is including how well a coach can assess talent, or at least in comparison to the industry. Also I think it is of note that even in our terrible 2012 season, we performed exactly as expected to our talent level.
Taking a look at the names of coaches that appear in the positive vs negative, its clear that Beamer still has been performing well, (obviously 2013, 2014 data withstanding). The only other coaches that have had that consistency include Saban, Stoops, Carroll and Meyer.
None of this is an attempt to directly make a pro/anti change in the program argument, I just thought it provided some interesting data.
Comments
Disciplined good talent can occasionally beat undisciplined great talent. Not consistently, but occasionally. The problem with relying on 'merely' good talent to overcome great talent is that great talent is seldom undisciplined, and great disciplined talent almost ALWAYS beats good disciplined talent. UMiami has a culture of being undisciplined in the last two decades.
Pretty interesting analysis. Reinforces the idea that Beamer does well with the level of talent that we are able to recruit. I think a common refrain among the Beamer-must-go crowd is that he doesn't do a good enough job recruiting, and that a different coach could bring in more talent. Big question I have is whether that new coach would do as good a job as Beamer at utilizing that talent.
Its frustrating seeing elite guys not come here, but I cant imagine how frustrating it would be watching your program bring in the top guys and do nothing with them
Very interesting to see Duke 2009-2012 on the wrong side of that list. I always thought they overperformed for the talent they had but the data implies they had underperformed by about 10%. Also the data implies that 2012 is our norm with a 0% over/under performance. Yikes.