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A Statistical Look at Transition Recruiting Classes

Posted on Gatorbait, too, but curious as to folks' thoughts here:

Rather than let this recruiting cycle drive me to the bottle, I've turned to the spreadsheet.

To get an idea of what we can expect from (or at least contextualize) this year's recruiting class, I looked at about a dozen programs that fired their head coaches for performance reasons and compared each program's transition year recruiting class with the average of the three prior years.

More specifics below, but I found that the transition class was, on average, 1.52 times worse than the average of the three prior years (e.g., a program with an average pre-firing class rank of 10 and transition class rank of 15).

The drop was more pronounced with schools that had a three year recruiting average in the top 15. Those programs had transition classes that were 1.98 worse than their three year average (e.g. average pre-firing rank of 10, transition class rank of 20). Looking at the drop in pure ranking places (as opposed to the drop as a percentage of the program's average rank) the average drop among this group was 10.48 places.

Florida's average recruiting class rank for the last three years was 5.33. If this year's class has a drop along the lines of the top-15 programs it would end up between 11th (5.33 x 1.98) and 16th (5.33 + 10.48).

That seems like an unrealistically favorable outcome, but perhaps history and the numbers should give us some cause for optimism.

Here is a link to my spreadsheet ( http://speedy.sh/JD9vS/Coach-change-recruiting-impact.xlsx)

The schools I looked at were:

Texas, USC, Kentucky, Auburn, Tennessee, Mississippi, Illinois , Tex. A&M, UCLA, Miami, Michigan, Minnesota, Vandy .

The rankings are 247.

I intentionally omitted coaching changes resulting from retirements, coach poach, and bad behavior (looking at you Bobby Petrino) so as to hopefully capture the recruiting effects of both the new staff's limited opportunity to build relationships with recruits as well as the program's reputational damage from the performance backslide that resulted in the coaching change.

FanPosts are written by members of the Alligator Army community, and do not necessarily represent the opinions, editorial judgment, or standards of Alligator Army or SB Nation.

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