How Texas A&M stacks up to the SEC West in Recruiting Strength

You, me and that dude over there love ourselves some college football stats.

We rode that gravy train to all kinds of explication in the last blog post, which delved into how Arkansas’ perpetual lack of recruiting punch (relative to the SEC champions) is crimping the Razorbacks’ style, especially when it comes to beating Nick Saban.

But there’s no reason to stop at merely one article, not when there’s soooo much more data upon which we can get our geek on.

You want to see how all the SEC West teams stack up when it comes to recruiting oomph?

Below you’ll see a balls-out breakdown of how many four and five star recruits each SEC West program (including likely future member Texas A&M) has snagged in the last nine years, and how that correlates to the number of wins their program had in the following four seasons.

The topmost graph shows the average number of wins each of these programs had in successive four-year spans. There are less years in the spans closer to the present, because the top recruits are still playing out  their eligibility (some play beyond four years, although redshirting is less likely with four and five-star players).

Read the rest of this entry »


Alabama versus Arkansas: A Statistical Breakdown of Recruiting

The venues, helmets and results stay the same.
All that changes, it seems, are the stitches on the back of their opponents’ jerseys.
By falling to Alabama 38-14, Arkansas lost its bid to join college football’s VIP club for the fifth time in three years. Forget Arkansas-LSU: that annual late-season showdown is always close, and the Hogs will win their fair share.
But the SEC money games which could catapult the Razorbacks into national title contention occur in the season’s first few weeks, and the Hogs have whiffed on Alabama the last three seasons, Florida in 2009 and Auburn in 2010.
Each time, there’s a recurring theme: Arkansas’ opponents unleash game changers with talent the Razorbacks simply can’t match.

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