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:
- Is our staff underachieving in recruiting given their salary?
- 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
- 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.
- 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 |
Comments
This is the type of analysis that keeps me coming back to this site. Excellent work!
agreed sir, to the OP you are a gentleman and a scholar. i love VT but me and you spend our time after an exam very differently. lol maybe you cant turn your brain off. me i cant wait to turn my off haha.
That type A will get after ya
VT is ranked 30th with a limited-size recruiting class, and did pretty well the last two years.
Play with the numbers, but looks great to me.
I'm willing to give it a few years, which is the only real way to see how effective this type of coach is at coaching and recruiting. He was never a flashy salesman hire, he was a program-building hire to replace Beamer. Amazingly, he was able to convince Bud to stay on for the rebuild.
Kept both the important streaks alive this year in spite of a LOT of attrition, so I'm still a big Fuente/Babcock fan. They're both doing great.
Edit: I'd love if we could poach one of the UMD salesman-type recruiters, but who would people want to replace? Our coaching staff is like a family, but it needs to be a performing one.
I know this isn't what you were getting at with your comment, but it's worth noting that 247's composite coach points (the main stat I used to determine how good a coach is at recruiting) do adjust for size of class.
I was trying to point out that if it were a bigger class with this level of quality, it would have been ranked higher.
Kudos to your analysis. Interesting to look at the numbers in this way.
Bud Foster: Fuente's greatest recruit!
Great work.
I've always said that it's really common sense that money has a significant impact on recruiting. The more challenging question is what is a realistic recruiting celieng for the VT football program at its current financial state. Obviously it's higher than what we are currently achieving but specifically how much higher?
Typically classes in the 20-30 range with the occasional top 20 class seems like the obvious answer to me.
To me, the question isn't just what is our ceiling at the current financial state, but also how often can we hit it. If our ceiling is top a top 20 recruiting class, but we hit it once every 5 years, and for the other 4 years we hover around 25-30, then our on the field ceiling is competing for the ACC coastal. If our ceiling is a top 20 class, but we hit it 4/5 years, then we can compete for the ACC and an NY6 bowl.
As in all things in life, more money = more room for error.
Oh absolutely. I'm just curious of what that celieng is so that we can have a standard by which to then measure consistency.
I really enjoyed your analysis but I have to say I completely disagree with your assessment that the occasional top 20 class with consistent classes in the 20-30 range puts our ceiling at competing for the ACC coastal.
We won the coastal in 2016 and were very competitive with the Deshaun Watson-led Clemson team that won the national championship. We didn't have a single top 20 recruiting class from 2012-2016 and 3 of our 4 highest rated recruits over that period (Kendall Fuller, Joel Caleb, Holland Fisher) weren't even on the 2016 roster.
Pitt won the coastal this year and their highest rated class was #30 in 2016 with multiple classes in the high 40s. UNC won the coastal in 2015 and only had a single top 25 class in the eligibility period (#18 in 2011). I don't even have to look at GT's recruiting before they won the coastal in 2014 or Duke's in 2013 because I know neither had a top 20 class. Even looking outside the ACC, Northwestern played for the B1G title this season and their highest ranked recruiting class was #47 in 2015 with the other classes being in the 50s.
As for the CFP, Washington made it in 2016 with only one top 20 recruiting class (#18 in 2013) and otherwise in the mid 20-30 range. Michigan State made it in 2015 without a single top 20 class (#23 in 2015 was the highest but 3 years were in the 30s). It certainly takes a special season but I think a CFP appearance can absolutely happen at a program that recruits the occasional top 20 class and routinely lands at 20-30 (which I believe is an ambitious but feasible goal for VT given financial and other constraints that you touched on). Also I'll point out that only 10 different teams have made the playoff in 5 years so it's hardly a common event even for teams that have more regularly signed top 20 classes (Texas A&M, LSU, Texas, Michigan, Auburn, Penn State, Tennessee, Florida, USC, Miami, UCLA, Stanford).
You can certainly bring out one or two examples that don't fit the rule, but by and large recruiting success correlates well with success on the field.
I think if we're going to do more than occasionally compete for Coastal title, we clearly need to be consistently bringing in top 20 recruiting classes. 2016 was a bit of an anomaly as we had a new coach and an offense that no one had seen. That's not to say that there won't be odd years, like this year where a very average Pitt team won the Coastal.
To have a chance of even sniffing the playoff, we need to win the ACC outright. And for the near future, Clemson is clearly the team we have to beat. We're not going to beat them with recruiting classes nearing the 30s.
Honestly it's easier to find teams that underachieve with top 25 recruiting classes year after year than teams from outside the top 25 average that do better consistently.
Not if your goal is to make the playoff and win a national championship.
Syracuse beat Clemson last year and took them to the final minute in Death Valley this year. Syracuse's highest ranked class in the last 5 years was #52. In 2016, Pitt won at Clemson and I already chronicled that their recruiting classes never eclipse top 20. So I guess I don't agree that VT can't beat Clemson in an ACC championship game with consistent recruiting classes in the 20s and high quality coaching.
Also going back to the "one or two examples don't fit the rule" comment, 14 of the 20 CFP appearances have been Alabama, Clemson, Oklahoma and Ohio State. For the most part it has been the same programs over and over while plenty of elite recruiting teams (those I listed above) haven't made the playoff. I'm not saying recruiting at an elite level doesn't help significantly but when 4 teams have dominated playoff appearances, it's harder to determine how much of that success should be ascribed to recruiting rankings versus the best coaches in the the sport (basically it's impossible to untangle the significance of being a blue blood program, program management, on-field coaching abilities, recruiting ranks, etc.)
What if I phrase it this way: VT cannot consistently beat top 10 teams and win conference titles without top 20 recruiting classes.
Sure we can win some big games here and there, and string them together for a great season every few years, but if we want to be a top 15+ program year in and year out, in a time it's harder than ever to find 'diamonds in the rough', we need to recruit at a top 20 level at least somewhat consistently.
That's probably true but I would say consistently beating top 10 teams and winning conference titles would make you a top 5 program year in and year out (essentially that would put you at the current level of Alabama, Clemson, Oklahoma, and Ohio State). Then I would debate whether or not that is realistic for VT (and my answer would be 'no' at the current funding levels).
I don't disagree with you, but special seasons don't happen often. Between injuries, attrition, draft picks, etc, a lot of seasons that we think will be special fail to meet expectations. We can win the coastal the way we've been recruiting the previous few years (as you've alluded to, the coastal is not strong), but we won't be the favorite every year recruiting the way we have in the past.
That said, I honestly do think this staff is improving recruiting, and I think they can get us back to being annaul coastal favorites.
I think the goal is:
Coastal
Then ACC Championship,
Then playoffs.
Probably take several years to get there, really. But I think Fuente's recruiting so far puts us solidly on that path.
"Several years" to get WHERE exactly!? Also, please define "several".
Agree with the 1st part. Jury's still out on the 2nd part.
Yes, jury is still out. We haven't reached out goal, but we're trending in the right direction. I think Chris said it really well in this comment (I recommend you read the whole thing - If there were annual awards for comments, I'd nominate this one). This recruiting class is going to be forever scarred due to missing Devon Ford. If we landed him, we'd have five 4-star players in this class, plus a 5-star, which would arguably be the best class in VT history. We got beat out for Ford (not due to lack of effort or execution from what I understand), but we still have five 4-stars in this class. If we can recruit at this level annually, a 'special season' might be a CFP birth instead of an ACC title.
But, we need to recruit at this level annually for that to happen. To do that, we really need Cornelson and Nix to step up, and Lechtchenburg to make a difference..
If we had TKP awards I'd nominate this one for Forum Topic OP of the Year.
Yea... Why don't we?
This was a terrific post, btw. I opened it expecting another rant and after reading every word, I found it extremely interesting.
Kudos to bar1990.
Thank you. I get a little irritated reading the complaints about how 'we need to recruit better' and 'we need to hire better staff' without any comments on how to go about doing that. I find that the most interesting posts on this site are made people who either dive deep to identify the actual problem our program is facing, and/or suggest actionable solutions to those problems. Hopefully this post will generate some interesting discussion about if/who/why a coach needs to be replaced, and who is a realistic and obtainable choice to replace them.
It's easier to criticize, than synthesize.
But it makes sense to analyze.
As long as our coaches have good bang-for-buck recruiting and don't stray into buck-for-bang recruiting, I'll be alright.
Thanks for putting this together, bar1990. Time to go back in your comment history and give you a bunch of upvotes because the time to pout this together deserves more than one.
Throw most of those legs at hokie07ME, I couldn't have made the tables for this post without his comments helping with HTML.
I had to repost this gif from the other META thread...this was hilarious @Ernest!
I love how she casually just catches one of the chairs thrown at her
We need some context here. Also, the GIF is sped up a little from reality.
That's what got Hugh Freeze fired from Ole Miss/rehired at Liberty
Thanks for crunching these numbers, like you mentioned a crude but interesting analysis. I think we can all agree that Zohn is our best recruiter for a few reasons (young, African-American that we have seen relate and be relentess in pursuit of recruits) but Wiles is surprise.
I also think we are achieving in recruiting about level with our budget, geography, and non blue blood status. I think we should invest more into more recruiting staff (you see how that works out for Bama and Georgia with like a 17 to 4 person advantage in recruiting support staff) and find a few more guys like Zohn over the next few years if guys like Nix, Mitchell get fired or Wiles/Bud retires.
Nix has had a lot of success recruiting in the past, he also had a lot of juco connections. I would give him a year or so to she how in his recruiting picks up, he was a late hire.
Great work Bar1990! I would also nominate this for "Best TKP user OC thread of 2018," if that were a thing.
I do have a few concerns, not with your work, but with how 247 calculates their "Recruiter Rankings":
1) The 247 coach recruiter rankings are quite interesting at times. Obviously, they label primary and secondary recruiters, and I assume give each coach points accordingly, but that doesn't necessarily mean they were the primary cause for landing someone. For example, it fails to capture the impact that a OC/DC, or head coach could have ultimately played in the recruiting process despite possibly not being listed. I'm sure there are plenty of recruits who were recruited primarily by a position coach but had a strong desire to play for Saban, or for a Venables' defense as their main reason for committing.
2) I once again draw curiosity to how they are assigning these points. For example, Jeff Scott from Clemson is credited with SIX 5* commitments, 13 commits who were .96 or higher, and 26 overall 4* commits during his time as a recruiter.
For a 3 year lookback he has landed:
Tee Higgins 5* 2017
Derion Kendrick 5* and Justyn Ross high 4* in 2018
Frank Ladson 5* and Joe Ngata high 4* in 2019 class.
That's not everyone from the last three classes, but those are just MAJOR recruiting wins off the top of my head in the last 3 classes.
Zohn, who seems to one of if not our best recruiter, has a very high score but his haul includes one commit .96 or higher, and only four 4* commits total.
It seems difficult to put these guys as even being close to the same category.
Thank you for your vote. I agree with your comments - I was pretty frustrated that I couldn't find even a vague explanation of how points are assigned to recruiter rankings.
Regarding Scott vs. Zohn, I don't think 247 has them in the same category - In the numbers I used, there's almost 20 points separating them. If we ignore the coaches given zero points, we see that Scott is 2.2 Standard Deviations above the mean, while Zohn is 1.1 - That puts Scott in the 97ish percentile of recruiters, and Zohn in the 70ish percentile - which seems accurate to me.
Also worth noting that Kendrick, Ross, Ladson and Ngata wouldn't be included in this analysis since they weren't in the class of 2015-2017.
I have gone down that same rabbit hole to no avail.
I know my examples at the bottom don't fit into this analysis, but I really just wanted it to illustrate the point of the type of athletes this guy is landing on a yearly basis compared to our top guy.
So this explains the meta post about tables
Will read the entire post later when I have more time, but I do have one small point of contention that I don't know if your data takes into consideration:
Outside of Bud, Charlie Wiles and Zohn, the vast majority of the kids in the 2015 class weren't recruited by our current coaches - they were recruited by Lefty, Shane, Frank, etc. The Fuente staff was more trying to hold on to the recruits we already had plus trying to sneak in a few gems in the two months they had before NSD.
Correct, this was by design. Basically, my goal wasn't to determine how well VT recruits, it was to determine how well each of these 150 or so coach's recruits, regardless of their employer, and compare them against each other. I totally acknowledge that this data is pretty crude; it's not adjusted for coaching changes, school resources, or anything like that.
Our 2018 played this year. Interesting approach and great work on this
Ah fuck, you're right!
This is a great post. Good job.
This is good work, and having pulled similar data from 247, it takes a ton of time to do, so thanks.
I have 2 quick questions:
1. Can you explain the '3 Year Trend' table a little more? I'm not fully following those results, or what meaningful trend is being established in such a small window - this may just be me being dumb. Georgia and Clemson with similar budgets and results, but on totally opposite sides of the spectrum here is throwing me off.
2. Can you post the full VT staff with their overall rankings? Zohn and Wiles shouldn't come as any surprise, as they're on the lower end of our staff salary-wise, but have been 2 of our strongest recruiters the last 2 years. I'd like to see how the whole staff fits in, it seems like outliers could play a big role in the overall 'team ranking'
Thanks!
It was pretty arbitrary. I didn't want to focus on a single year of recruiting, because I thought that a lot of good recruiters could have a bad year, purely because of a random mediocre high school classes in the area they recruit, or because they just happened to miss a couple of high ranking recruits that they normally hit on. The opposite could also be true. I also didn't want to pick too large of window because I thought it could be missing a lot of good data (for example AAR, who is one of the top recruiters, would have a way lower score than he should), or include information that wasn't relevant. I just randomly decided on three years.
One major mistake that I did make - I should've included information from classes 2016-2018, NOT 2015-2017. I failed to realize that the class of 2018 was already playing this season.
Regarding UGA and Clemson - UGA's staff salary is very top heavy - 4 coaches making more than $800k and 3 making less than than $400k. Clemson only has three coaches making more than $800, with Venables at $2.2M, and then it trends down a lot slower than UGA. Obviously, these outliers really throw salary related measures off.
Good Idea, I'll add to OP. You're absolutely that outliers play a big role in all of this analysis, it's just the nature of 247 not being spreadsheet friendly. I would love to have SQL access to their recruiting database.
Some more takeaways from these numbers:
So who's someone we could go after? Maybe Derek Jones - He's a top 20 recruiter, and a Defensive Backs coach at Duke (not exactly a recruiting powerhouse, but located smack in the middle of an area we want to recruit). We don't know what he's making, but I'm guessing it's between $400-450k (pure speculation). He coaches an area of the defense where some believe we need a coaching upgrade, and I recall Duke's DB's typically being pretty good. Two challenges exist with this move:
Both of these are interesting takeaways:
The first being concerning, because of where I expect to see Cornelsen and Foster on the list - although Foster may be a little higher than his historical average, given the date window you chose.
Second, is that Derek Jones is a name that often gets thrown around on 247 as a potential coach to go after. Moves like he or AAR are the ones that could really help us - guys who could help improve recruiting and likely on-field play - at a reasonable salary level.
AGREED. I didn't realize this until looking through these numbers, but $400k-$450k is kind of that entry level salary for someone who coaches really well and recruits really well. $150k-$300 is the price range for someone who does one of those things well. Of our three staff members making north of $400k (Foster, Shibest, and Corny), only Foster has been delivering in recruiting as of late. I truly believe that Shibest is a great special teams coach, so I'm okay with his salary, but Cornelson has not lived up to his salary. I'm not saying that necessarily means he needs to be replaced (he had some shit luck this year, though I'm not opposed to Fuente replacing him), but I would be disappointed if he got anything more than a cost of living (inflation) bump during this offseason.
In regards to Foster, I would go back to the first point I made up above. The way 247 assigns primary/secondary recruiter to these commits doesn't necessarily capture the allure of a great DC or Head Coach that could have been a primary reason for a player selecting that school.
For example: Of our 3 top LB recruits from last cycle (not captured in your rankings as you've mentioned)
Foster was only listed as secondary for Dax Hollifield, we KNOW from our insiders that Bud was the driving factor in his recruitment, not primary listed recruiter James Shibest. He was also listed as secondary on Alan Tisdale, and not listed at all for Keshon Artis. I don't believe for a second that he was not involved in the allure to VT and recruitment of Keshon Artis.
Over the last couple cycles he is listed as Primary or Secondary on Dax, Nathan Proctor, Dylan Rivers, Tyjuan Garbutt, and Alan Tisdale. So I feel pretty good about his return recently.
That said, I don't think he is blameless in our defensive recruiting issues, particularly along the DL. Just some context to add to these numbers.
Thanks for adding the full staff. I was nervous about seeing Cornelsen's numbers, and I'm glad you posted them. I have been fairly vocal about wanting him replaced, mostly because of how significantly he struggles to recruit - which isn't always very obvious if you're not closely following recruiting. We can't be getting zero out of that role. If the offense was humming at a top 25 level, you may make some consolations, but it's bad. Happy to have some quantification.
I always got the sense that the coordinators role is split between game planning and recruiting with the assistants split more 60-40 recruiting to coaching. With the additional Gameday responsibility the coordinators make the bigger bucks and only chip in on recruiting.
So....Transitive property means throw more money at the coaches and we will have immediate improvement in recruiting success?
I'd say these numbers are very much inline with what I expected pre-breakdown. Thanks for taking the time to put this together Bar.
thanks for all the work putting this together.
While I'm glad we seem to be getting pretty good bang for the buck, they don't give out trophies for that. In the end, it's just the bang that matters, not how much you have to pay for it (insert Vegas joke here). I don't want to be wasteful with money, but if our goal is value, we're going to get blown past by the schools willing to throw around cash in the hopes of getting overall numbers up. In today's game, you can't really sneak up on the top tier teams like you could in Beamer's hey day.
Comes down to three things for me:
Trying to keep perspective.
Who is this "We" and "Our" referenced to in the title? It is not our program. It is the team we support and get emotionally involved with but we don't own it.
I feel completely inadequate as a member of this proverbial community after seeing this amount of research and presentation. Very well done.
I wonder why PSU doesn't report. They are public.
I believe Fireman mentioned once that Pennsylvania has really weird FOIA laws, and I wonder if that could play into them not having to report.
did you track how a coach performed in recruiting after they changed schools..like Gray at VT and Gray at UF?
247 provides history at the coach level. So for example, James Shibest's 2015 numbers are based on his time at Memphis. His 2016 and 2017 numbers are based on his time at VT.
Forum posts can go plaid, right? I mean, like, they can go plaid?
Or is there like a little icon that goes next to the post in the tracker indicating that it's been legged that many times? Is there a post of the year honor? A hall of fame for topics?
I've wanted a comment hall of fame and hall of shame for a while. One for forum topics would be good too.