What can GT expect in OFEI and DFEI rankings with current recruiting numbers?

[Longestday]

We all know recruiting ranks do parallel rankings. There are outliers up or down. That is why people want a recruiting head coach.

I believe GT has a ceiling in recruiting given the current structure of the school and the funding of the program no matter the recruiter. This recruiting ceiling should result in a max OFEI and DFEI, when playing similar or vanilla football, given same plan different players. Given recent past data, I believe this max would be in the 25-45 rank range with parallel general rankings.

This is why I believe GT needs an edge in order to achieve higher success given today's parameters of APR, GT school, and GT funding. Some people call an edge a gimmick, I call it an Xs and Os coach.

I cannot believe anyone would not want an OFEI from GT 2008 to 2018, really?.

Second, after looking at the data, I cannot say a 40 rank defense is great and on fire. No one ever said that 40s was great from 2008 to 2018. We can say the defense is very much improved from 2019 and 2021 to 2022. Perspective...

What do you think we cn achieve in recruiting and rankings?

 

[Jim Prather]

I tend to agree with you. I believe that there is a structural limit to our ability to recruit. Furthermore, with the advent of NIL, I believe that our ability to recruit has diminished rather than improved. Effectively, all the headwinds we faced in the past has multiplied since the use of "bagmen" has been legalized and put on steroids. I think 40s - 60s may be our new recruiting limit. The one equalizer for us may be the transfer portal. A lot of players get homesick, and with Georgia being such a talent rich area, that means a lot of players wanting to come back in-state. We should be at the front of the line to get these players. That being said, our bread and butter has to be "out-coaching" other teams rather than "out-athleting" other teams.

 

[Randy Carson]

That being said, our bread and butter has to be "out-coaching" other teams rather than "out-athleting" other teams.

I've got an idea...and I'm just spit-balling here...but what if we were to hire a coach who installs an offense that most other teams don't see regularly and haven't adequately prepared for? Something our coaches and players know better than our opponents do?

Could that possibly work?

 

[Jim Prather]

I've got an idea...and I'm just spit-balling here...but what if we were to hire a coach who installs an offense that most other teams don't see regularly and haven't adequately prepared for? Something our coaches and players know better than our opponents do?

Could that possibly work?

I think that is a brilliant idea. Any recommendations?

 

[Techster]

I tend to agree with you. I believe that there is a structural limit to our ability to recruit. Furthermore, with the advent of NIL, I believe that our ability to recruit has diminished rather than improved. Effectively, all the headwinds we faced in the past has multiplied since the use of "bagmen" has been legalized and put on steroids. I think 40s - 60s may be our new recruiting limit. The one equalizer for us may be the transfer portal. A lot of players get homesick, and with Georgia being such a talent rich area, that means a lot of players wanting to come back in-state. We should be at the front of the line to get these players. That being said, our bread and butter has to be "out-coaching" other teams rather than "out-athleting" other teams.

In terms of NIL, one thing that can give GT hope is Cabrera's emphasis on it during the AD search. He was adamant that he wanted an AD that knew his way around NIL and could utilize it to GT's advantage. That coupled with wanting GT to compete on the field like we do academically should give all GT fans reasons for hope.

Of course, talking it is easy...walking the walk is another story. We'll see soon enough.

 

[slugboy]

We’re just talking football here. We do recruit very well in other sports, like baseball, women’s basketball, golf, volleyball, tennis, etc. We’re improving our basketball recruiting, but it used to be fantastic. We’ve recruited really well at football before.

That’s a long way of saying, while we have recruiting limitations, we’ve been really successful before.

Lots of our issues are our own self-destruction. Hiring good recruiting staff is paying dividends. One of our bigger challenges is being in the ACC instead of the SEC—a lot of the local players want to play against their friends, even if they go to Missouri to lose to their friends. FSU, Clemson, UNC, and Miami overcome that fairly well. We haven’t been a fun team to watch on offense, defense, or special teams the past three years, and we’re finally fun to watch on defense this year. Players also want to go where they’ll look good playing. They want to play with their friends. They want to get better and have a path to the league.

Tenuta put players in the league because the coaches there knew that they had the fundamentals down. Johnson put receivers in the league because coaches knew that his receivers could block AND catch and WOULD do both.

TL;DR: I don’t think our ceiling is “top 10 classes every year” but it’s 20’s, sometimes 30’s, a class in the “teens” once in a while, and the occasional mind-blowing good class.

I also think it’s more important to recruit smart.

Of course, I have a chart, but it’s SP+ and not FEI. I could put one together for FEI though. Here’s 2016, and the farther right you are, the better your team is (adjusted for competition). We’re average in recruiting, but we’re above average in performance. Louisville and Washington are really outperforming a 1-year rating. Also, Army was our equal and Western Kentucky was better than us, despite not being in our league at recruiting.

Recruiting and performance are related, but if you’re smart you can outperform your recruiting rank by a ton.

 

[slugboy]

Here’s a more recent chart (SP+ went paywalled in 2020, so 2019 is the most recent one of these charts). UCF and Baylor are even with Michigan and Auburn and Notre Dame, despite not being anywhere close to their recruiting levels.

 

[stylee]

We all know recruiting ranks do parallel rankings. There are outliers up or down. That is why people want a recruiting head coach.

View attachment 13579

I believe GT has a ceiling in recruiting given the current structure of the school and the funding of the program no matter the recruiter. This recruiting ceiling should result in a max OFEI and DFEI, when playing similar or vanilla football, given same plan different players. Given recent past data, I believe this max would be in the 25-45 rank range with parallel general rankings.

This is why I believe GT needs an edge in order to achieve higher success given today's parameters of APR, GT school, and GT funding. Some people call an edge a gimmick, I call it an Xs and Os coach.

View attachment 13577

I cannot believe anyone would not want an OFEI from GT 2008 to 2018, really?.

Second, after looking at the data, I cannot say a 40 rank defense is great and on fire. No one ever said that 40s was great from 2008 to 2018. We can say the defense is very much improved from 2019 and 2021 to 2022. Perspective...

What do you think we cn achieve in recruiting and rankings?

The defensive numbers are fascinating. With how much salt should we take Woody's lone campaign in 2018? That dropoff from Roof's last year is pretty dramatic. I can't recall if there was some rash of injuries and/or departures that made the poor performance more justified. Looking at the game logs, the early season gashing by USF jumps out. After that, we gave up a ton to a Lawrence-led Clemson, which seems appropriate. The 31 points we gave up to Louisville may have made sense in the context of that game, where we were scoring on almost every play offensively.

Firing Groh in early October of 2012 was bold but clearly the right call. I wish we could have hung on to Charles Kelly!

 

[Creative]

I tend to agree with you. I believe that there is a structural limit to our ability to recruit. Furthermore, with the advent of NIL, I believe that our ability to recruit has diminished rather than improved. Effectively, all the headwinds we faced in the past has multiplied since the use of "bagmen" has been legalized and put on steroids. I think 40s - 60s may be our new recruiting limit. The one equalizer for us may be the transfer portal. A lot of players get homesick, and with Georgia being such a talent rich area, that means a lot of players wanting to come back in-state. We should be at the front of the line to get these players. That being said, our bread and butter has to be "out-coaching" other teams rather than "out-athleting" other teams.

But Atlanta is a recruiting Mecca. haha

 

[Randy Carson]

Here’s a more recent chart (SP+ went paywalled in 2020, so 2019 is the most recent one of these charts). UCF and Baylor are even with Michigan and Auburn and Notre Dame, despite not being anywhere close to their recruiting levels.

View attachment 13582

It appears that there are 8-9 ACC logos above and/or to the right of the GT.

That's bad, right?

 

[slugboy]

It appears that there are 8-9 ACC logos above and/or to the right of the GT.

That's bad, right?

I’m sure we won’t forget anytime soon, but 2019 was a BAD year for GT football.

========

Championships are in the rarified recruiting levels of Ohio State, Alabama, Clemson, UGA, etc. Cincinnati managed to get in the game at much lower recruiting levels. On the other hand, Kentucky improved their recruiting in Ohio and the midwest and got better that way.

To me, it looks like you can play up near the top by “making the most of what you have”, but that there’s a group of a few teams that out-recruit everyone else and also coach well. In supply-and-demand terms, that’s where all the demand is, so you’ll see SoCal, FSU, and Texas spending like the rest (and maybe spending more, but getting worse results than Utah, Baylor, and UCF playing moneyball*.

*moneyball is defined here as outsmarting richer clubs/universities with the premise that the collective wisdom of football insiders is outdated, subjective, and flawed, and evening an unfair playing field by finding undervalued players, coaches, and schemes.

 

[roadkill]

I’m sure we won’t forget anytime soon, but 2019 was a BAD year for GT football.

========

Championships are in the rarified recruiting levels of Ohio State, Alabama, Clemson, UGA, etc. Cincinnati managed to get in the game at much lower recruiting levels. On the other hand, Kentucky improved their recruiting in Ohio and the midwest and got better that way.

To me, it looks like you can play up near the top by “making the most of what you have”, but that there’s a group of a few teams that out-recruit everyone else and also coach well. In supply-and-demand terms, that’s where all the demand is, so you’ll see SoCal, FSU, and Texas spending like the rest (and maybe spending more, but getting worse results than Utah, Baylor, and UCF playing moneyball*.

*moneyball is defined here as outsmarting richer clubs/universities with the premise that the collective wisdom of football insiders is outdated, subjective, and flawed, and evening an unfair playing field by finding undervalued players, coaches, and schemes.

If you draw a straight line between, say, Alabama and UTEP, you can get an idea of where the "main sequence" teams lie. This would be those teams whose performance reflects their recruiting, with a normal correlation. If you play Moneyball, you expect to be to the right of this line, but recruiting still matters. It looks like for the 2019 chart that there is a "wall" around SP+ of 20 for teams that do that. To get better SP+ it appears that you need to recruit well above average. Not sure exactly what this translates to in terms of recruiting rankings but likely better than 20th.

 

[BCJacket]

I feel like platitudes and narratives about recruiting get thrown around that in most cases aren't really accurate. Truth being, overall, CPJ's recruiting wasn't significantly worse than Chan's (outside 2007). Chan tied his worst ranking year of 70. C**** went all in in recruiting and had one pretty good year and then settled out right about the long term average of mid-40s. His average was 42nd (granted, with smaller sample size). CPJ's was 50th, Chan's was 48th. So, basically, going all in on recruiting with a 'great recruiter', as C**** was supposed to be, moved the needle ~5 spots.

On the flip side, the narrative that 'an option offense makes recruiting much worse' is bull hockey.

 

[Techster]

View attachment 13583

I feel like platitudes and narratives about recruiting get thrown around that in most cases aren't really accurate. Truth being, overall, CPJ's recruiting wasn't significantly worse than Chan's (outside 2007). Chan tied his worst ranking year of 70. C**** went all in in recruiting and had one pretty good year and then settled out right about the long term average of mid-40s. His average was 42nd (granted, with smaller sample size). CPJ's was 50th, Chan's was 48th. So, basically, going all in on recruiting with a 'great recruiter', as C**** was supposed to be, moved the needle ~5 spots.

On the flip side, the narrative that 'an option offense makes recruiting much worse' is bull hockey.

One thing to keep in mind about Chan's recruiting rankings is recruiting services were just starting become big at the time. Chan had a lot of classes where recruits were 2 stars or NR because those services didn't have film or prospect camps to rate recruits like they do now. Also, services didn't really do the post commitment ranking bumps like they do now. 3 of Chans classes ended up being top 5-20 recruiting classes in retrospective rankings.

 

[slugboy]

If you draw a straight line between, say, Alabama and UTEP, you can get an idea of where the "main sequence" teams lie. This would be those teams whose performance reflects their recruiting, with a normal correlation. If you play Moneyball, you expect to be to the right of this line, but recruiting still matters. It looks like for the 2019 chart that there is a "wall" around SP+ of 20 for teams that do that. To get better SP+ it appears that you need to recruit well above average. Not sure exactly what this translates to in terms of recruiting rankings but likely better than 20th.

That wall around 20 just happened in 2019; 2016 didn’t have it, and had two mid-recruiting teams above it.

We should try to recruit 5* players, but we shouldn’t make that the core of our strategy until we have a track record of landing 5* players.

We want and should strive for better recruiting, but a recruiting-based strategy will probably yield middle of the ACC results, and we want better than that.

 

[Oldgoldandwhite]

Hire a good coach, give him the support he needs, and get the Hill to actually support athletics.

 

[roadkill]

That wall around 20 just happened in 2019; 2016 didn’t have it, and had two mid-recruiting teams above it.

We should try to recruit 5* players, but we shouldn’t make that the core of our strategy until we have a track record of landing 5* players.

We want and should strive for better recruiting, but a recruiting-based strategy will probably yield middle of the ACC results, and we want better than that.

I was thinking more along the lines of if we play Moneyball in recruiting (and thus overachieve on the field), what level of performance is reasonably achievable from an SP+ standpoint? The fact that only 2 teams that had middle-to-slightly-above-average recruiting managed to break through 20 SP+ in both 2016 and 2019 data would seem to show that the Moneyball approach is unlikely to consistently achieve elite results without elite recruiting. Not saying we shouldn't take the Moneyball approach, since we are unlikely to have elite recruiting, only that it tends to take you only so far. I made a similar argument (in principle) in an earlier discussion about UGA's transition from Richt to Smart. Just an observation, not necessarily a recommendation for us.

 

[slugboy]

I was thinking more along the lines of if we play Moneyball in recruiting (and thus overachieve on the field), what level of performance is reasonably achievable from an SP+ standpoint? The fact that only 2 teams that had middle-to-slightly-above-average recruiting managed to break through 20 SP+ in both 2016 and 2019 data would seem to show that the Moneyball approach is unlikely to consistently achieve elite results without elite recruiting. Not saying we shouldn't take the Moneyball approach, since we are unlikely to have elite recruiting, only that it tends to take you only so far. I made a similar argument (in principle) in an earlier discussion about UGA's transition from Richt to Smart. Just an observation, not necessarily a recommendation for us.

I would love to watch a team with a floor of 6-7 wins and the 11 or 12 wins in good years. Since the mid 1990’s, we’ve either had a good-to-great offense or a good-to-great defense, but not both. That’s been enough to have good football. The last few years, we’ve had neither.

We could look at those charts and say “how do we get to be Alabama or Clemson in three seasons?”. It took Alabama several seasons to become Bama, and they were one of the top moneymaking factories anywhere and were recruiting at close to that level before they had Saban.

I think we have a lot more in common with Cincinnati. This year Cincinnati is #41 in overall FEI, and they were #8 in 2021 when they were in the CFP. Their recruiting rankings since 2018 are 48, 79, 40, 42, and 42 (in 2022). They’re #41 this year. If I’d done that recruiting vs efficiency chart with FEI, Cincinnati would be way to the right of the line. Which Tech fan wouldn’t trade our last 3 1/2 seasons for theirs?

As far as recruiting, I think we can have a lot of years in the top 35 with the resources we have now, even playing “moneyball”. That can get better once revenue gets better, too. I also think we need to find and develop the players others overlook.

If we had the Gailey level defense with the GO’L or CPJ level of offense, that’s at least a top 20 team.

 

[MountainBuzzMan]

I feel like if everyting is clicking we can recruit in the 25-40 range. Then throw in a good game day coach, A good Offensive Scheme that gives us a little bit of an advantage as well as a Defensive Scheme and we should be a ranked team most years.

I also think CPJ recruited better than his rankings. Those rankings are more for a traditional offense. They certainly were not day and night better but his Offensive Efficiency was off the charts with players that fit his system. Just needed a damn defense

 

[4shotB]

I also think CPJ recruited better than his rankings. Those rankings are more for a traditional offense. They certainly were not day and night better but his Offensive Efficiency was off the charts with players that fit his system. Just needed a damn defense

OTOH, saying a HFC needs a good defense is lke saying a pro golfer needs a good short game.

WTBS, the great "what ifs" of GT FB include, but are not limited to:

-What if Tony Hollings didn't get hurt?
-What if CPJ had the full support of the President and the AD?
-What if we had hired Steve Spurrier as HFC?
-What if B*** L****'s team didn't squander a big lead at home gainst FSU? Or Bowden didn't put Charlie Ward in that dadburn shotgun offense that night?
-What if CBR had stayed at Tech instead of going to the NFL?