GIS and College Football Recruiting
September 25, 2007 11:27 amFiled in GIS
Kim’s post this morning got me thinking about a little project we did last year with respect to Florida College Football recruiting. Florida, during a good year, has the highest concentration of top ranked "Bowl Championship Division" (BCD) schools. Although FSU and Miami are struggling this year, the Bulls of USF and even the Golden Knights of UCF are looking like contenders for national attention (The Owls of FAU and Golden Panthers of FIU still have some work to do).
The reason why these schools are usually so good is because of the overwhelming number of nationally recruited prospects in our backyard. Those that are not recruited by or sign with Florida schools are quickly snatched up by their division rivals. During our project, we looked at the 2006 football rosters from the 7 BCD schools (UF, FSU, UM, FIU, FAU, UCF) and the hometown of those recruits to look for correlations, and oh did we find some interesting things out.
First we can look at the number of recruits per city. It should be fairly obvious that cities with large populations (Miami, Tampa, Orlando, etc.) are going to have more recruits because there are going to be more high schools with more students to choose from - even making the students in those schools more competitive amongst themselves.
I don’t know about you, but this graph does nothing for me. Anybody with Excel and the ability to walk through the chart wizard can come up with this. Let’s put it in a geographic perspective - because everybody loves maps, right?
The map shows the number of recruits per city as a circle with relative diameter. We can see here that beyond the large population centers in the state, that Gainesville and Tallahassee have a significant number of recruits. There are several reasons for this: the presence of nationally ranked schools which attracts talented coaching staff, summer camps hosted by those colleges and availability to recruiters. One thing this map does not show is that although Tallahassee and Gainesville have large numbers of recruits - no recruits from Gainesville went to FSU and no recruits from Tallahassee when to UF.
Beyond looking at the statewide recruiting results, we can look at distribution by region. In this image we use proportionately sized pie charts to show the number of recruits from various cities and their respective school. In the state of Florida, this is a quasi-neutral area–although you have heavy Gator populations in Lakeland and Bartow. I suspect that as USF gains respect on the national scene, we’ll see dramatic changes in these results in years to come.
We have gone further with this analysis and have even looked at recruits within individual high schools. We know that the rosters of the seven BCD schools contain 12 players from Lincoln High School in Tallahassee, 10 players from Glades High School in Belle Glade (typically a pipeline of top recruits for the Gators).
Maybe in the near future, we’ll begin to look at those recruits that leave our great state and see where they’re going. Does Georgia have a presence (9 Florida players on current roster) or NC State (20 Florida players)?
