Danny Town Di Chu J.C. Vivek G. NCAA Recruits & Ranks Research (Image Source: http://www.tannerfriedman.com/blog/?p=3575) Intro NCAA College Basketball is one of the most worldwide recognized sports today. College students, fans, and players go crazy over how competitive the sport of basketball is between every single college. Whether you are a fan of a small college like George Mason or a big school like Indiana University, everything about your team's success comes down to wins and making it to NCAA tournament championship. To get to and win the NCAA championship, you need outstanding players and a good rank in order to greater the odds due to the tournament having sixty-four teams. With that being said, our main goal in this research project is to present the correlation between how incoming recruitment is affected by a college team's previous NCAA rank. Therefore, the question we want to answer is, "Does a team's previous NCAA Rank affect whether a recruit goes to a certain college to play basketball?"
Background "The NCAA organization was founded in 1906 to protect young people from the dangerous and exploitive athletics practices of the time." ("National Collegiate Athletic Association.") It was first created due to the rough aspect of football, but soon enough, the NCAA covered basketball, baseball, and other athletics for colleges as well. "After many years of this organizations birth, the NCAA Basketball Tournament and Championship was created in 1939."("National Collegiate Athletic Association.")The organization created a complex system for the way in which basketball tournament would be ran. This newly birthed system, without knowing, would change the way of college basketball forever. Here is a quick explanation from NCAA.com on how the teams are collected for the tournament, A total of 68 teams qualify for the tournament played during March and April. Thirty-two teams earn automatic bids as their respective conference champions. Thirtyone of the thirty-two conferences hold championship tournaments to determine which team receives the automatic qualification. The remaining thirty-six tournament slots are granted to at-large bids, which are determined by the Selection Committee, a group primarily of conference commissioners and school athletic directors who are appointed into service by the NCAA. The committee also determines where all sixty-four teams are seeded and placed in the bracket." Overall, sixty-four teams end up in the tournament. The tournament consists of four regions or sometimes referred to as divisions. The regions in the bracket are the Midwest, South, East, and West. The NCAA places sixteen teams in their region and then decides their seeding (or what we refer to as rank) position, 1 through 16. The teams are then ranked according to their regular season statistics. This means teams are ranked number one if they are the best in their region, or sixteen, if they are the worst in their division. Here is an example of a bracket below: (Image Source: www.illinoisloyalty.com)
Also, The NCAA Selection Committee ranks teams in the regular season as well. They do this in a different way than the way in which teams are seeded in the tournament. The one aspect in which they do not include in season ranking (but do include in deciding on a team's tournament rank) is region. Therefore, only one team can only be number 1 during the season. The committee also ranks teams on a weekly basis, so ranks tend to change drastically over the course of the regular season. The only similarity between regular season ranking and tournament ranking is how the committee compares team stats to each other (and toughness of the team's schedule) and then decides as an organization which team deserves what rank. The rank in which Team Crimson will be focusing on is the NCAA's finalized team ranks. This finalized ranking system uses similar ways of which are used for the regular season ranking system. The finalized rank includes all games (regular season and tournament). Overall, this means the final ranking system presents the year's best team of compared to every team in the nation. (Note: The number #1 team is the NCAA champion) Now that you know a little about the history of the NCAA and how teams are ranked, lets look at how this applies to our research project. The main question we want to answer is, "Does a team's previous NCAA Rank affect whether a recruit goes to a certain college to play basketball?" The way Team Crimson will approach this question will be in both a qualitative and quantitative sense, which is explained in our research plan. Research Plan Our research plan consists of both qualitative and quantitative data. We gathered both types of data and then we drew a correlation between the two. Please read below to understand what the quantitative and qualitative data wield. Quantitative Data The quantitative data consists of mapping out previous years of college basketball prospects and then noting what school they decided on. First, we retrieved the top 25 high school recruits from the years of 2010 and 2011. We also randomly gathered 20 high school recruits from the years of 2005 and 2008. We then noted their offers as well. By each team name is a pair of parenthesis with a number inside. This is the teams NCAA final rank from the previous year. Here is an example of the quantitative data:
The names in red are the prospects that had offers from high ranked NCAA teams but did not attend the school with the highest NCAA rank out of their choices. This means NCAA rank did not affect their decision when deciding on a school to go to. The same type of data but different format is shown below: As you can see the setup here is a little different from the previous version. We put the ranks in a different column. Notice that all ranks are not filled out. We could do this because once we found a school with a higher rank than the one chosen it answered our research question. Once again, the names in red are the prospects that had offers from high ranked NCAA teams but did not attend the school with the highest NCAA rank out of their choices. This means NCAA rank did not affect their decision when deciding on a school to go to.
Quantitative Data Overall: 14 out of the 70 recruits decided to go to the college with the highest previous NCAA Final Rank out of their list of colleges recruiting them. This seems like a high correlation (20%) but it is not in fact. Many of the recruits only had one to two colleges recruiting them, therefore agreeing "Yes" with the research question. This skewed our data because four to six of them were apart of the 14. Qualitative Data The qualitative data consists of an interview with Stuart Douglass. Stuart Douglass was a co-capitan his junior and senior year on Michigan Universities basketball team. He was one of the starting five four three years there as well, so he knows a lot about basketball and how recruits think. One of the main reasons we decided to construct an interview with him is because he decided to accept an offer from the school with the highest previous year NCAA Final Rank. We believe the answers he provided were very beneficial because even though he did pick the school with the highest previous year NCAA Final Rank, his reason for going to such a school was not because of this. Here is the interview in which I constructed and his answers he provided. Name: Stuart Douglass 1. What college do you play basketball for? I played for Michigan University.
2. What year did you start school there? X 2008-2009 2009-2010 2010-2011 2011-2012 2012-2013 3. Did you have any basketball offers from other colleges? (Include preferred walk- on schools) X Yes No (If No, skip question #4) 4. If so, what colleges? (Include preferred walk- on schools) I had offers from Harvard and Colorado. 5. Rank the importance of the following (When you were deciding on a college to play at): 1. The Coaching Staff 2. The team's NCAA Basketball Rank 3. Academics 4. The Campus (Location) 6. How did the college's previous NCAA Basketball Rank(s) affect your decision when picking a college? It affected my decision a lot X It affected my decision a little It did not affect my decision at all 7. I noticed you said, "A college's previous NCAA Basketball Rank affected your decision a little". Why did it not affect your decision more? "The reason why it did not affect my decision more is because, as a player, you do not have time to think about previous ranks. It is only a system for the public and does not determine a team's outcome. I mean, Danny, I know you watch basketball and played in high school so you know a little about the game. Player's pick schools like an investment. They only want to invest their time in something that will make them better, make them achieve the next level, and in my case I wanted to invest in a school that would take me to the NBA or overseas by making me become a better basketball player. This is why I ranked Coaching staff as number one. The coaching staff is the reason why players pick schools. Players will look at a coach's history; determine how many players have become more successful due to being taught by this coach. Every top recruit that plays basketball in college has a passion for the game of basketball and wants to achieve this next step or make it a career/occupation. I would have ranked it 4th but the only
reason I made it number two is, not to boast but all my options are beyond extraordinary in academics and location. This is the sole reason why I decided to rank it number two." 8. You may not, but do you believe players pick schools based on the college's previous NCAA Final Rank? I mean, I noticed Michigan wasn't your only option. Michigan was ranked above Colorado & Harvard in the NCAA the year before your freshmen year. "Danny, some players may pick schools based on the college's previous NCAA Final Rank but, if they do, it is not a smart move. I mean, why would they? Players come and go, so the future cannot be determined based on the past at least when it comes to college basketball. The only reason why I picked Michigan, regardless of its higher previous rank above Colorado & Harvard, is because A. I loved the coaching staff and B. I did not have an enormous amount of offers. And the reason why I did not have a lot of offers is because I somewhat decided on Michigan way before my senior year. With that being said, other schools did not try to recruit me because they knew it would just be a lost cause. Like I said earlier, deciding on a school is like deciding on what you want to invest your money in. Players will look at the past obviously, but not the team's past NCAA Rank. They will look at the coach's past history. The coach is similar to a CEO; he directs the company, or basketball wise, the team. We all want to get better and he is the only one that will make it happen." 9. Basketball is a team sport though Stuart. Do you not believe being around a better team would make you better? Shouldn't you look at the team's past NCAA Rank because that is the better team? I understand what you are saying, but the fact of the matter is, is that, when it comes to deciding on a school you cannot look at it in a team type of way. You have to look at it in a personal matter. Team's become great because of the plays in which the coach creates. Players also do not pick schools based on the past because they know not all of the previous year players will not be there. Overall, rank means nothing and coaching staff is everything. Look at the big win Indiana had over Kentucky when Kentucky was ranked number 1. The better team was Indiana but just so happened to have a worse rank than Kentucky. It just goes to show rank doesn't mean anything and players do not consider it when picking a school." Discussion: We decided as a group that both the quantitative and qualitative data answered the research question with a "No, a college's previous NCAA Final Rank does not determine if a player goes to a certain college to play basketball" view. On the quantitative side of data, we believe the skewed 20% was not enough to draw a correlation. On the qualitative side of data, we believe Stuart showed us that recruits hardly take a team's previous NCAA final record into play when it comes to deciding on what school to choose. We all believe that this study does open up more possibilities when it comes to finding out why a recruit would pick a school to go to though. It may
not be a previous team rank but it may end up being the coaching staff of a certain school as the recruits reasoning. The only thing that really limited us was being ability to talk to multiple players as they are somewhat looked upon as stars, very popular, and hard to get a hold of. Conclusion We conclude this study with the research question being answered but being answered negatively. All the recruits information and all the teams previous NCAA Final Rank showed us that the recruits did not pick schools based on a school's previous NCAA Final Rank. Stuart Douglass's interview also showed us that recruits (or may be just him) pick schools based on coaching staffs and not the school's previous NCAA Final Rank as well. This study has great potential because it could change the basketball world and how colleges recruit athletes/select coaches. Others might find interest in what recruits really want from colleges and what goes through the recruit s mind when deciding on a school. Overall, it is very interesting because something small like this could snowball into something huge and change a worldwide college sport recruitment system. References: "NCAA College Basketball RPI Rankings & Ratings 2013." NCAA College Basketball RPI Rankings (updated Today). N.p., n.d. Web. 15 Nov. 2013. "National Collegiate Athletic Association." History. N.p., n.d. Web. 25 Oct. 2013. "NCAA DIVISION I MEN'S BASKETBALL CHAMPIONSHIP PRINCIPLES AND PROCEDURES FOR ESTABLISHING THE BRACKET." NCAA DIVISION I MEN'S BASKETBALL CHAMPIONSHIP (n.d.): n. pag. Web. <http://www.ncaa.com/sites/default/files/files/bracketprin-proc10-5-10.pdf>. http://sports.yahoo.com/footballrecruiting/football/recruiting/rankings/rankrivals150/2005 Website: http://mypage.iu.edu/~dtown/rankresearch/i399.html Video: Sent via email (Shutterfly.com) since youtube didn't work for us. Will also be on website!