[Husker] A case for recruiting rankings

[Nick Chevance]

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."
Benjamin Disraeli

First of all, Jon is correct.  The author is very good; he writes well and
clearly, and while the debate about the subject matter may go on for years,
the article is pretty easy to understand.  I enjoyed it.  Thanks, Jon.

Now, what we have here is a correlation.  The rankings, a rather subjective
measure of athletic skills and abilities, of recruits correlate with the
success of any given team on the field, as measured by wins and losses.
Some say its flawed.  You betcha.  Much like predicting the weather, the
massive amount of information available about the weather has to be selected
and simplified in order to make a prediction on an outcome that won't take
longer than it takes to actually observe the effect (i.e., have the forecast
for rain before it actually rains).  In this case, there may be correlations
between a whole host of factors, and the more data used and more complicated
the modeling, the more reliable the outcome (hopefully).  I'm not convinced
that ranking high school athletes is scientific enough to be more than
informed guesswork, but its probably better than a correlation between a
running back's 40 times and the length of the team's cheerleader's
eyelashes.  But because there are so many factors, which ones do you choose?

And, in the end, does it demonstrate a cause and effect?  In other words, is
the correlation between Rivals rankings and winning percentage mean that the
more highly ranked recruits a team gets spells more wins on the field.  You
can't say really, because that's what is really fun about correlations.
They are pretty easy to point out, but damn hard to prove.  Take the link
between smoking and lung cancer - the link was known for years, but it took
a long time to prove that link.  There are so many other factors that go
into the winning percentage factor alone (and that may be the only "hard"
fact in this study) that proving that link would be difficult at best.

And isn't that what sports talk is all about?  That's why we develop all
those statistics in the first place, and then shuffle them around until it
makes us go "Hmmmm, maybe it is the length of the cheerleader's eyelashes
after all!"  Its the wholesale conjecture about minutia that gets us going,
and makes us write long paragraphs to email lists when we should be getting
work done (ooops!).

A last note on the significance of statistics in sports.  I was at the
Creighton - Drake game last night (no, I didn't wear a sweater but I did
drink some beer) and Drake was ranked 22/23 going in, but Creighton was
favored as much as by 7.  Did Drake have the better athletes and are they
the 22nd or 23rd best team in the country?  I have no idea what the Rivals
rankings were for their players, or for Creighton for that matter, and I
have no idea how either team would fare against the 21st or 24th best team.
What did matter is that one team rebounded really well, got shots inside the
paint (the easier, shorter shots) and got them to drop.  The other team
didn't rebound well, didn't get many inside shots, and even fewer to drop.
In short, the team that won scored the most points, and seemed to work
harder at making that happen.  Now, I can get raw statistics for much of
that, but I'm not sure what the statistic to use to measure that last part,
the "effort" part (a confounder).  But its that last part that we'll argue
about because it is so hard to measure.

Nick
-- 
"Science is a good thing. News reporters are good things too. But it's never
a good idea to put them in the same room." Scott Adams