MtnWasp
Ramblin' Wreck
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College football and basketball is evolving on a parallel course with pro sports models. This is sensible because of the size and revenue of the industry.
With the portal and above-board pay for play, we now have talent free agency that moves close to the pro sports model. I think we will see us move progressively towards improved structure of player compensation to stabilize the industry.
But one element of the college game that is radically different from pro sport is high school recruiting. In the pay for play era, high school recruiting is "pay to sign" and is highly speculative. This is a high risk endeavor and therefore an inefficient utilization of resources where compensation resources are better allocated to more proven, less risky, players.
Yet, the influx of talent is essential to team sport programs at all levels. Competition for high school talent is practically a sport within sport for college programs.
Pro sport leagues have mitigated the risk of young, unproven talent acquisition while protecting competitive integrity by implementing a draft. In the Free agency era, the leagues then slotted salaries by draft standing that controlled the negotiation mess that was developing in those leagues. The NBA also moved moved away from drafting high school players because the risk of those players failing is so high.
Since there is no draft for college sports, slotting and structuring compensation for high school recruits is problematic.
The recruiting process has not changed much moving into the pay for play era. We still have the basic sequence of scouting ----> Offer -----> Official Visit -----> Commitment -----> LOI.
There is an existing recruitment model in a different industry by which colleges may be able borrow principles to better structure and manage the risks of the high school recruiting/compensation system.
When medical students have finished their 4 year program almost all of them move on to train in a specialty, mostly through residencies. Not all of these residency programs are equal. There is a hierarchy of desirability, prestige and promise of riches and glory among the different specialties and different individual positions. Some are highly desirable and competition for those spots is fierce among the new M.D.s
And on the other side, hospitals with open residency positions are in fierce competition for the most talented young doctors they can find.
So they have developed a matching system. Hospitals will invite a given number of interviews (Official visits) of young doctors for a given opening that they have. The new doctors will interview at a given number of hospitals that have an opening in their intended specialty. This is the recruitment stage.
After the official visit process, the hospitals submit in order of preference a ranking of new doctors they think would be acceptable for their opening to a matching body. The young doctors do the same, listing in order of preference the openings that they would be willing to attend, and submit their list to the matching body. By algorithm, young doctors are matched to the best opening based on mutual interest rankings.
Needless to say, it is an exciting time for those involved.
This model has the promise of applicability to high school recruiting because it would retain the basic structure of recruiting as it now stands.
It would require some designation of a tiered system of compensation. Tier one recruits would be compensated with $x, Tier 2 with $y, Tier 3 with $z. Programs would have to agree on the numbers. The big schools would agree with this so long as there was not a limit on the number of high compensation packages they could offer.
When schools offer a recruit, the offer would come with a compensation tier designation, 1, 2 or 3. Recruits would then make their official visits as normal. Each school would know in advance how much they would spend because each opening has a compensation designation value up-front. So the system is conducive to budgetary planning.
At a certain deadline, recruits submit their ranked preference list and so do the programs and the match is done by algorithm. On signing day, a programs recruiting class is announced.
Such a system would clean-up a lot of the messier aspects of high school recruiting and kids would only list schools that are acceptible to them and schools would only offern players that are acceptible to them.
With the portal and above-board pay for play, we now have talent free agency that moves close to the pro sports model. I think we will see us move progressively towards improved structure of player compensation to stabilize the industry.
But one element of the college game that is radically different from pro sport is high school recruiting. In the pay for play era, high school recruiting is "pay to sign" and is highly speculative. This is a high risk endeavor and therefore an inefficient utilization of resources where compensation resources are better allocated to more proven, less risky, players.
Yet, the influx of talent is essential to team sport programs at all levels. Competition for high school talent is practically a sport within sport for college programs.
Pro sport leagues have mitigated the risk of young, unproven talent acquisition while protecting competitive integrity by implementing a draft. In the Free agency era, the leagues then slotted salaries by draft standing that controlled the negotiation mess that was developing in those leagues. The NBA also moved moved away from drafting high school players because the risk of those players failing is so high.
Since there is no draft for college sports, slotting and structuring compensation for high school recruits is problematic.
The recruiting process has not changed much moving into the pay for play era. We still have the basic sequence of scouting ----> Offer -----> Official Visit -----> Commitment -----> LOI.
There is an existing recruitment model in a different industry by which colleges may be able borrow principles to better structure and manage the risks of the high school recruiting/compensation system.
When medical students have finished their 4 year program almost all of them move on to train in a specialty, mostly through residencies. Not all of these residency programs are equal. There is a hierarchy of desirability, prestige and promise of riches and glory among the different specialties and different individual positions. Some are highly desirable and competition for those spots is fierce among the new M.D.s
And on the other side, hospitals with open residency positions are in fierce competition for the most talented young doctors they can find.
So they have developed a matching system. Hospitals will invite a given number of interviews (Official visits) of young doctors for a given opening that they have. The new doctors will interview at a given number of hospitals that have an opening in their intended specialty. This is the recruitment stage.
After the official visit process, the hospitals submit in order of preference a ranking of new doctors they think would be acceptable for their opening to a matching body. The young doctors do the same, listing in order of preference the openings that they would be willing to attend, and submit their list to the matching body. By algorithm, young doctors are matched to the best opening based on mutual interest rankings.
Needless to say, it is an exciting time for those involved.
This model has the promise of applicability to high school recruiting because it would retain the basic structure of recruiting as it now stands.
It would require some designation of a tiered system of compensation. Tier one recruits would be compensated with $x, Tier 2 with $y, Tier 3 with $z. Programs would have to agree on the numbers. The big schools would agree with this so long as there was not a limit on the number of high compensation packages they could offer.
When schools offer a recruit, the offer would come with a compensation tier designation, 1, 2 or 3. Recruits would then make their official visits as normal. Each school would know in advance how much they would spend because each opening has a compensation designation value up-front. So the system is conducive to budgetary planning.
At a certain deadline, recruits submit their ranked preference list and so do the programs and the match is done by algorithm. On signing day, a programs recruiting class is announced.
Such a system would clean-up a lot of the messier aspects of high school recruiting and kids would only list schools that are acceptible to them and schools would only offern players that are acceptible to them.
