On desktop, right click on the link and "View Image" to zoom in
I started this project over the winter after reading an article ranking the best recruiting classes of the past 30 seasons. While it was an interesting read, I kept wondering why there wasn't any real data on any of this?
I enlisted the help of my wife in discovering how Microsoft Excel worked again (I maintain a stranglehold on the workings of MS Paint in the house.) I started copying and pasting and crunching the data from the past 30 years of Hokie football. My first draft went back to 2003, where the birth of the 247 composite scores began.
But rather than produce an indictment of recruiting scores, I decided to complete a project integrating the input, output and results of the past 30 years of Hokie Football.
I may have caught the same bug as pi this offseason, who has been stacking up the coaching abilities of the ACC coaching staffs. I was pretty ecstatic to see a fellow fan crunching away at the same area of data I was. I wonder if Hokie Fireman has anything to say about all of this?
I'd like to think I'm done with this project, but if you have any comments, question or suggestions, I'd be happy to hear it.
Comments
This is glorious. A quick suggestion is to make the images themselves links to full sized versions. You can highlight the img tag and then click joe's link button and it will put the tag in the "text" box.
But well done sir, well done indeed.
Thank you!
There is a lot to absorb here - great work.
Wow, excellent detail...Thanks for putting this together. Pretty amazing what Beamer was able to put together over the years. Let's hope Fuente gets us over that last little bump.
I like what you did with the recruiting class impact scores. The 1998 and 2007 classes seem to have been the two highest producing classes.
As VTmbaHacker mentioned, there is a lot to take in, but brockman was there anything you found surprising while you were putting this together?
The first time I ran the numbers through from 2003 (the start of the 247 rankings), I realized pretty quickly I was going to need 6 highlighters to track the progress of our classes on paper. My original intent was to work through these awful recruiting rankings just long enough to find out why they seemed biased against us.
After I finished with the VT seasons, I broke down the Florida '06-'07, Alabama '08-'09 and OSU '09-'11 classes. (These seasons tend to show up on a lot of "top recruiting classes of all time" lists, so they seemed like an interesting side project). It didn't seem like anything notable then, but I no longer had to use six different highlighters. Five was plenty.
The last year I went through, the 2016 stats for Ohio State, was printed out for no reason at all because their entire 2012 class was already gone.
4 years and GTFO.
It's not a bad problem to have when you have a National Championship to show for it, but I'm willing to bet the Mississippi's and the UNC's of the landscape are burning through kids with the firefly model to no avail, too. Kinda makes you want to crack open a beer and put on a smug grin for a couple of hours.
I started this assuming I would find an obvious flaw in the recruiting rankings because I remembered watching so many top 30 classes turn into top 15 teams. There just wasn't anything there to suggest that the rankings, over scale, were flawed or biased or wrong.
The idea that we routinely keep kids on scholarship for 5 seasons, and often a 6th is actually pretty smart. We've had experienced, knowledgeable kids on the field playing out their peak years, and we didn't have to capitalize on a major religion we no longer have direct access to do it.
Okay, that was kinda mean.
I'm pretty interested in what Pi's coming up with now; his project is the next logical conclusion (we have a patient program that oozes efficiency), when I was looking for the wrong stuff (all y'all recruitniks are fulla crap) in mine.
This is fantastic and thanks for taking the time to compile and organize!
Man, I can't believe we finished in the year end top 10 only four times in Beamer's 30 years. Felt like so much more.
We were top ten in October much more often.
We finished 10th in 2009, but I guess I only colored the numbers below that line. That should be an easy fix.
This is an amazing data visualization. Really appreciate all the hard work and time you put into it. Please hit me up if you pursue another endeavor of similar quality again. I will make sure it hits the front-page.
Think its a little interesting that our national ranking taking a dive pretty much aligns directly with Clemson and FSU coming into their own as legitimate national powers over recent years. From that chart, it looks like that loss to Clemson in the 2011 ACC Championship Game drove the final nail in the coffin on our national relevance under Beamer, even though we didn't know it at the time. We were only ranked for 5 total weeks in the 4 years to follow that game.
I think that's just a function of Clemson/FSU building depth at the same time that that our roster was weakened by poor recruiting, attrition, and a failure to develop talent. More coincidence than anything else.
Agree, but at the same time, it does show how weak the ACC pretty much was from 2004-2010. Absolutely no doubt about it, we were the top dog of the conference during that time, but we only finished Top 10 twice during that span, and spent more weeks unranked (24) than we did in the Top 10 (21). Makes you wonder if our good years were actually really that good, or if we were good only because the rest of the conference couldn't get its act together.
I don't think there's any doubt that it was a little bit of both. We had a few really good seasons (2007 and 2009 come to mind), but on the other hand from 2004 to 2010 our main competition within the ACC came from Georgia Tech and Boston College, and Wake Forest won the ACCCG in 2006. Not exactly murderer's row for those 7 seasons.
A very unfortunate look at our big OOC games and BCS record might have that answer.
So since 1995, we expected a high 80s-90s season score team every 4-5 years. The data and graphics confirm that we were way past overdue.
Looks like CJF has a us trending in the right direction. I hope there is less variability in future years season scores and we always maintain production in the high 90s!
This is the best piece of data mining and visualization I've seen on this site and you deserve everything that comes to you, and your enemies should also get what they deserve.
Your infographic prowess puts me to shame.
I included "proficient in MS Paint" on my resume many years ago. And I'm a Reactor Operator, and the interviewer pulled me aside and asked me "Seriously why did you put this on here?"
I like where your project is heading, and I wish I had realized where you're going with it.
This is absolutely amazing work. Where else but TKP can we see amazing free content done by members? Let's keep this site around for all things like this. Join the Key Players Club and help keep this site going.