When are recruiting services...

[Fullbacksympathy]

going to start counting transfers in their calculations?

 

Isn't it kind of absurd at this point to not count them as part of a recruiting class?  They often get recruited harder than high school kids and, most of the time, have a more immediate impact.  How are they any different in calculation than a JUCO?

 

Odd.  

 

 

[busticket]

3 hours ago, LK1 said:

going to start counting transfers in their calculations?

 

Isn't it kind of absurd at this point to not count them as part of a recruiting class?  They often get recruited harder than high school kids and, most of the time, have a more immediate impact.  How are they any different in calculation than a JUCO?

 

Odd.  

 

 

i was thinking the same thing.  With the transfer portal, this is a prominent part of recruiting that is here to stay.

[hugh42]

2 minutes ago, busticket said:

i was thinking the same thing.  With the transfer portal, this is a prominent part of recruiting that is here to stay.

 

It will be interesting to see how the transfer portal changes, if any, when high school kids choose to commit/sign, meaning they may wait longer to see what a team's roster actually looks like.

[atskooc]

My question is: When are recruiting services just going to go away?

[huskerbill85]

So if we start rating transfers as you're proposing would recruiting services use their high school rating or rate them on their performance on the team they were transfering from?

[Fullbacksympathy]

2 hours ago, huskerbill85 said:

So if we start rating transfers as you're proposing would recruiting services use their high school rating or rate them on their performance on the team they were transfering from?

Same way they grade JUCOs, whatever that is.  JUCOs don’t get a high school rank.  They get a college rank upon transferring. 

[Fullbacksympathy]

5 hours ago, atskooc said:

My question is: When are recruiting services just going to go away?

They won’t.  They actually help a lot of kids get exposure, especially in tandem with services like Hudl.  I think their analytics are getting better.  

[atskooc]

3 hours ago, LK1 said:

They won’t.  They actually help a lot of kids get exposure, especially in tandem with services like Hudl.  I think their analytics are getting better.  

I know they won’t. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t annoying. 

[hhcmatt]

12 hours ago, atskooc said:

My question is: When are recruiting services just going to go away?

 

Rivals gives you 0 stars for this post

[aphilso1]

I don't know if we'll ever see recruiting services include transfers.  It's not what their business model is built on.

 

Think about why recruiting services started up in the first place -- to give fans an idea of what types of players are being brought in, because generally speaking we as fans had no idea how Bob Smith from Kearney, NE compared to Jim Jones from Suches, GA.  High school players were an unknown commodity.  To a lesser extent, so are junior college players; while there are fewer JUCO teams and the level of competition doesn't vary as much as it does in high school, it is still pretty difficult to watch and analyze tape of all the JUCO players to know how a player projects to D1.  The recruiting services' business model is based on doing just that -- analyzing players' abilities across a wide spectrum of competition levels, and standardizing those abilities in a scoring/ranking system.  

 

Now by comparison, grading D1 transfers is exactly the opposite.  With high school recruits, Rivals/Scout/etc have a few years to analyze each player and catalogue them in their recruiting service, and then to adjust their rating as the season(s) progress before giving a final rating.  In contrast, D1 transfers are often on the market for only a week or two.  Analyzing H.S. footage is an art form, where the analyst has to project potential at the next level based on physical attributes, productivity, and relative competition level.  In contrast, D1 transfers have much less projection because a) they already have shown what they can do in D1 and b) the competition gap between D1 conferences is infinitely smaller than the competition gap between NE 8-man football and high level Texas H.S. football.

 

I guess my point is this.  We already know what kind of player to expect from our transfers.  So why do we need a recruiting service to tell us that?

[atskooc]

46 minutes ago, hhcmatt said:

 

Rivals gives you 0 stars for this post

Which does nothing to influence my talent as a poster, so I'm good with that.

 

[49r]

23 minutes ago, atskooc said:

 

Which does nothing to influence my talent as a poster, so I'm good with that.

 

 

Register for an account over at btownbanners.com and you'll automatically be graded a 3* 

[Fullbacksympathy]

57 minutes ago, aphilso1 said:

I don't know if we'll ever see recruiting services include transfers.  It's not what their business model is built on.

 

Think about why recruiting services started up in the first place -- to give fans an idea of what types of players are being brought in, because generally speaking we as fans had no idea how Bob Smith from Kearney, NE compared to Jim Jones from Suches, GA.  High school players were an unknown commodity.  To a lesser extent, so are junior college players; while there are fewer JUCO teams and the level of competition doesn't vary as much as it does in high school, it is still pretty difficult to watch and analyze tape of all the JUCO players to know how a player projects to D1.  The recruiting services' business model is based on doing just that -- analyzing players' abilities across a wide spectrum of competition levels, and standardizing those abilities in a scoring/ranking system.  

 

Now by comparison, grading D1 transfers is exactly the opposite.  With high school recruits, Rivals/Scout/etc have a few years to analyze each player and catalogue them in their recruiting service, and then to adjust their rating as the season(s) progress before giving a final rating.  In contrast, D1 transfers are often on the market for only a week or two.  Analyzing H.S. footage is an art form, where the analyst has to project potential at the next level based on physical attributes, productivity, and relative competition level.  In contrast, D1 transfers have much less projection because a) they already have shown what they can do in D1 and b) the competition gap between D1 conferences is infinitely smaller than the competition gap between NE 8-man football and high level Texas H.S. football.

 

I guess my point is this.  We already know what kind of player to expect from our transfers.  So why do we need a recruiting service to tell us that?

 

Good question.  I'm thinking about it less in terms of reporting a new recruiting scoop as I am calculating the transfers into the final rankings.  Even with this incredible shift in roster talent, I still don't really know how Nebraska stacks up against other schools because I don't know how well they did in the transfer portal.  I would also argue given the Petteways and Palmers of the world that the transfers haven't necessarily shown what they can do at prior institutions.  

[hhcmatt]

11 minutes ago, LK1 said:

 

Good question.  I'm thinking about it less in terms of reporting a new recruiting scoop as I am calculating the transfers into the final rankings.  Even with this incredible shift in roster talent, I still don't really know how Nebraska stacks up against other schools because I don't know how well they did in the transfer portal.  I would also argue given the Petteways and Palmers of the world that the transfers haven't necessarily shown what they can do at prior institutions.  

 

Verbal Commits has a quick and dirty ranking system to aggregate this stuff https://www.verbalcommits.com/conferences/big-ten

However, it's still generating this number based on last year so it's not going to count our 2021 class. You or someone will be tempted to work through each player individually in the meantime because the number generated won't be as high as one would like; this would be a waste of time.

 

Generally speaking the rest of the conference recruits better than us because we don't land a ton of highly regarded guys and we work in international, juco, and lower-level transfers.  Generally speaking these rankings will also mirror your standings in the conference but that's not absolute; Wisconsin almost always outproduces their rankings while Indiana has been underperforming.  Michigan State essentially swapping 4 star guard Rocket Watts for 2 star transfer Tyson Walker because they believe it will make their team better is a specific piece of evidence that subjective evaluations of high school students isn't absolute in its prediction of team success.

 

[basketballjones]

On 4/22/2021 at 8:52 AM, aphilso1 said:

 It's not what their business model is built on.

 

Certainly seems like a new opportunity for a site to figure out. 

[aphilso1]

39 minutes ago, basketballjones said:

Certainly seems like a new opportunity for a site to figure out. 

 

It seems that way until you actually think about from a business perspective.

 

I wouldn't do it if I was Rivals or 24/7.  Sure, they could in theory just do like we've done here on this board and include transfers in a recruiting class using their old high school rankings.  That's lazy though and really not providing anything of value.  And in most cases it actually would make team rankings less accurate (for example, Haanif was clearly not one of our all-time top 5 recruits but he would be ranked that way if transfers were included using their H.S. rating).  To do it right, a recruiting service would need to re-evaluate 100% of transfers and assign them a transfer ranking, similar to how they rank JUCOs.  There are two major hurdles to doing that well:

-time (Rivals has a minimum of a full season to analyze HS and JUCO recruits' film; in contrast, they don't know a transfer is a "recruit" until he enters the portal, at which point they would have to analyze over a thousand D1 transfer's film in only a few weeks)

-insufficient game footage (most transfers leave due to lack of playing time, meaning they don't have a whole lot of tape to analyze)

 

It's a bad idea for the big name recruiting services to take that challenge on.  They either use the lazy method and include transfers' H.S. rating, which will reduce overall recruiting ranking accuracy.  Or they have to hire a ton of temporary staff to scramble and re-evaluate a boatload of players every April.  That would also likely reduce accuracy.  And in an industry were accuracy=reputation and reputation=subscribers and subscribers=$$$...there is literally no incentive for the big boys to start ranking transfers.  Now maybe a startup could fill that void to make money off of a niche capability, but if I'm a venture capitalist then that business model sure isn't getting any of my investment dollars.  That's a high risk/low reward business venture.

 

 

[cornfed24-7]

38 minutes ago, aphilso1 said:

 

It seems that way until you actually think about from a business perspective.

 

I wouldn't do it if I was Rivals or 24/7.  Sure, they could in theory just do like we've done here on this board and include transfers in a recruiting class using their old high school rankings.  That's lazy though and really not providing anything of value.  And in most cases it actually would make team rankings less accurate (for example, Haanif was clearly not one of our all-time top 5 recruits but he would be ranked that way if transfers were included using their H.S. rating).  To do it right, a recruiting service would need to re-evaluate 100% of transfers and assign them a transfer ranking, similar to how they rank JUCOs.  There are two major hurdles to doing that well:

-time (Rivals has a minimum of a full season to analyze HS and JUCO recruits' film; in contrast, they don't know a transfer is a "recruit" until he enters the portal, at which point they would have to analyze over a thousand D1 transfer's film in only a few weeks)

-insufficient game footage (most transfers leave due to lack of playing time, meaning they don't have a whole lot of tape to analyze)

 

It's a bad idea for the big name recruiting services to take that challenge on.  They either use the lazy method and include transfers' H.S. rating, which will reduce overall recruiting ranking accuracy.  Or they have to hire a ton of temporary staff to scramble and re-evaluate a boatload of players every April.  That would also likely reduce accuracy.  And in an industry were accuracy=reputation and reputation=subscribers and subscribers=$$$...there is literally no incentive for the big boys to start ranking transfers.  Now maybe a startup could fill that void to make money off of a niche capability, but if I'm a venture capitalist then that business model sure isn't getting any of my investment dollars.  That's a high risk/low reward business venture.

 

 

But its not like they haven't evaluated these players before. They're not starting from scratch. Pull up their old file and sprinkle in a bit of new analysis.

 

Also, its not like these services are all that accurate. You seem to be disregarding that a portion of what these services provide is nothing more than entertainment value. 

 

People WANT that information. And many are willing to pay for it. A startup makes the least sense for the reasons you stated. But the established players already have a vast network in place and I don't know that the investment to evaluate transfers is as insurmountable as you seem to think.

 

My guess is these companies are probably exploring this right now to see if its viable or not. With the portal and the rule changes this is all uncharted waters. One thing I do know is if there is even the hint that money can be made they're sure as hell gonna try

[Fullbacksympathy]

You could literally branch off a transfer ranking sub site within any of these businesses and then find a way to incorporate the score into the overall class.. or, just leave it as a separate ranking.  It would be nearly as compelling/relevant in basketball as the traditional recruiting rankings.  

[Vinny]

I can’t wait until we win a little bit more and don’t feel the need to fret over stuff like this. I mean getting good recruits is awesome, I get excited with every commit and it should translate to results on the court. And it’s the off-season, I get it. I guess I’m just ready to wonder more about just how good we are in actuality than about how good we COULD be and why the services aren’t giving us enough credit for how good we could be.

[atskooc]

20 minutes ago, cornfed24-7 said:

But its not like they haven't evaluated these players before. They're not starting from scratch. Pull up their old file and sprinkle in a bit of new analysis.

 

Also, its not like these services are all that accurate. You seem to be disregarding that a portion of what these services provide is nothing more than entertainment value. 

 

People WANT that information. And many are willing to pay for it. A startup makes the least sense for the reasons you stated. But the established players already have a vast network in place and I don't know that the investment to evaluate transfers is as insurmountable as you seem to think.

 

My guess is these companies are probably exploring this right now to see if its viable or not. With the portal and the rule changes this is all uncharted waters. One thing I do know is if there is even the hint that money can be made they're sure as hell gonna try

Here's the problem: People want information they know isn't accurate.

 

The information is generally useless, though I guess it's kind of fun to talk about.

[hhcmatt]

Having some webpage where I see Eduardo Andre's freshman rating and a rating for Kobe Webster after 3 years at Western Illinois presented as some recruiting class seems incredibly pointless when I say it out loud. 

[cornfed24-7]

1 minute ago, Vinny said:

I can’t wait until we win a little bit more and don’t feel the need to fret over stuff like this. 

I would bet my last dollar we would fret more

[cornfed24-7]

1 minute ago, hhcmatt said:

Having some webpage where I see Eduardo Andre's freshman rating and a rating for Kobe Webster after 3 years at Western Illinois presented as some recruiting class seems incredibly pointless when I say it out loud. 

And yet here we are

[hhcmatt]

1 minute ago, cornfed24-7 said:

And yet here we are

 

Yes. A message board is absolutely the domain of the pointless.

 

 

[aphilso1]

35 minutes ago, LK1 said:

You could literally branch off a transfer ranking sub site within any of these businesses and then find a way to incorporate the score into the overall class.. or, just leave it as a separate ranking.  It would be nearly as compelling/relevant in basketball as the traditional recruiting rankings.  

 

It would be compelling for the month of April when transfer season is in full swing.  And would be void of information for the remaining 11 months of the year.  The juice just ain't worth the squeeze.  You're welcome to prove me wrong and pitch it to Rivals or 24/7 though.