Tuesday, August 29, 2006

Football - Recruiting Rankings

Sincere apologies about my MIA status the past few weeks. It has been hectic starting a new job in a brand new industry (going from paper industry to electronics). The learning curve is steep and the time available is way down. I'm not going anywhere but I'll try to keep things interesting as much as possible.

Here's an interesting story about "disappearing" football recruits by Dave Glenn. He makes outstanding points - that recruiting websites do not re-rank teams based on the actual freshman that show up on campus in the fall. When a school like UVA loses 7 players from their incoming recruiting class because they didn't meet minimum NCAA academic standards, how can you possibly rank their class with those 7 players included with any level of legitimacy? You can't. Note that Glenn points out that GT, BC, WF and Duke were the only ACC schools NOT to lose a recruit, and we rarely do. Just one more reason to lighten up about recruiting rankings - particularly team rankings.

It is also interesting to read the comments, where Glenn comments about the AT Barnes situation at GT:

The Tramain Hall-NCSU situation was completely different. Remember the three categories: qualifier, partial qualifier, non-qualifier. Barnes at Georgia Tech and Mullins at UNC are partial qualifiers. At the time of their enrollment, they met specific NCAA criteria (based on GPA, SAT and high school graduation) that has been defined as a partial qualifier. They're enrolling under the exact same rules as partial qualifiers in the past at UNC, NCSU, FSU, Clemson and many other schools.

The bottom line is, the NCAA told Georgia Tech and UNC that the Clearinghouse's reading of transcripts was different than Tech's/UNC's, but that under their readings Barnes and Mullins both are partial qualifiers.