Link: Study: Want to Get Drafted in the NFL? Go to Kentucky, Not Alabama!
- Thread starter RTR91
- Start date
I might like to see a larger sample size of schools just to verify that there wasn't a lot of cherry-picking going on with the selected schools, but it's not unreasonable to assume that getting more playing time early in your career at a "lesser" school can lead to greater development than you'd get by not playing as much at a big-time school.
You can make numbers say what you want them to say in a "study" like this. Look in the NFL, and tell me how many UK players are regular contributors compared to LSU, Bama, and other elite schools. The only UK player I can think of is Randall Cobb returning kicks for GB. Tamme (sp?) has also been a contributor at TE during his playing career. You have to go beyond draft picks and look at actual playing time in the league to determine which teams actually put players in the league. Furthermore, you might want to do a study on how many players made rosters and/or were drafted high enough to get guaranteed contracts. Just because you were selected in round 3 doesn't mean you will be playing in the NFL.
The explanation to this is simple statistics. If you have a small number of elite prospects, and you get lucky with a few of them making it to the NFL, your numbers are, by default, skewed above the average. The Wildcats, Beavers, and Illini have not had many elite recruits, and they just happened to be ones that skewed favorably rather than unfavorably. This kind of examination is pointless if your "n" for each school is too small. For example, if I say that out of all schools flipping a coin, 50.01% of flips were heads, this would be expected, as it is the aggregate of every school flipping the coin. But if each school flipped only twice, then roughly 1/4 of the schools would have a 100% success rate flipping heads. So, unless you had a number of good recruits (i.e. "n" in the study), then the numbers mean nothing.
However, if you have a lot of talent, these numbers can tell a LOT. If someone did a full statistical analysis on this study, I would anticipate that UK, UI, and OrSU would be outliers, and not statistically significant. I would guess that the difference in success between FSU and Alabama would be statistically relevant. There likely is a trend between Alabama and the other schools with a lot of "elite" recruits, but it may or may not be statistically significant (Confidence interval of 95% = only 5% chance the results could be random).
The 3 most intriguing results in this study seem to be Stanford, Alabama, and FSU. Stanford gets less "elite" recruits, but they get enough that their outcomes may be statistically significant compared to the mean.
What I take from this: If you're choosing between FSU and UA...go to UA.
However, if you have a lot of talent, these numbers can tell a LOT. If someone did a full statistical analysis on this study, I would anticipate that UK, UI, and OrSU would be outliers, and not statistically significant. I would guess that the difference in success between FSU and Alabama would be statistically relevant. There likely is a trend between Alabama and the other schools with a lot of "elite" recruits, but it may or may not be statistically significant (Confidence interval of 95% = only 5% chance the results could be random).
The 3 most intriguing results in this study seem to be Stanford, Alabama, and FSU. Stanford gets less "elite" recruits, but they get enough that their outcomes may be statistically significant compared to the mean.
What I take from this: If you're choosing between FSU and UA...go to UA.
It makes sense. There is much less competition at Kentucky, so top recruits have an easier path to playing time and being drafted. At Bama a 5 star recruit might not even start, and of course if he doesn't start he probably will not be drafted. A lot of great recruits get drowned in the sea of talent at Bama.
Some 5 stars never played much, if any, for us too. I'm sure those guys really skew the numbers. As another poster mentioned, you can be very creative with any type of mathematical equation. With a new sheriff, UK may be trying to get this "message" out there for potential recruits.
Translated: "Study gives incredible weight to schools who sign a lot of 'high three-star' athletes. And not 'high' as in Tyrann Mathieu 'high.' "
Bob played QB at Kentucky. He threw one pass in his career. The ball was batted back into his face mask and bounced 40 feet in the air traveling 15 yards backwards. His running back, who was knocked 15 yards backwards trying to pass block got up and caught the ball. The defense thinking the play was over, ran off the field without trying to tackle the running back who ran untouched 80 yards for a touchdown.
Statistical conclusion- Bob completed 100% of his passes for an average of 80 yards per attempt and a 100% Pass Attempt to Touchdown Ratio.
He was never sacked and never threw an interception.
Kentucky therefore is hands down the best school in the country when it comes to developing Quarterbacks.
Personally, I love statistics and they can sometimes truly be revealing. In this case I think a writer was having trouble coming up with something to write about.
Sip
Statistical conclusion- Bob completed 100% of his passes for an average of 80 yards per attempt and a 100% Pass Attempt to Touchdown Ratio.
He was never sacked and never threw an interception.
Kentucky therefore is hands down the best school in the country when it comes to developing Quarterbacks.
Personally, I love statistics and they can sometimes truly be revealing. In this case I think a writer was having trouble coming up with something to write about.
Sip
Agreed, but I think there's even more to it than that (if I understand the "study" correctly). Taking the extreme boundary case of a school that has no 4 or 5* recruits demonstrates the absurdity. If you have a program with nothing but 2* and 3* recruits playing, some of those players will eventually pan out as draft picks. If you produce even 1 draft pick over the 6 year period from your 140 or so recruits... well 1 divided by 0...
The study attempts to imply that a 5* recruit has a better probability of being a draft pick at certain schools, but that math would look something like this:
(# of 4 or 5*'s signed) / (# of 4 or 5*'s that became draft picks)
as opposed to:
(# of 4 or 5*'s signed) / (# of players of any "star" rating that became draft picks)
I don't see how the second formula provides any useful information.
The results for Stanford are likely much closer than KY and OreSt. It's simply that they don't get many good players to begin with.
Posted the study to see what others thought. Overall, I felt like it was pretty ridiculous. To show you where it's wrong, Bama has had 14 players drafted in the first round in the last 5 years.
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