Inside the minds of recruits?

So, it turns out there’s this thing out there that purports to help a school analyze which recruits it’s pursuing are likely to sign and which are likely to spurn.

The company founded by the four Northwestern undergraduates, called Zcruit, essentially borrows that same mentality, one of putting numbers behind what have long been gut-based decisions, and applies it to the recruiting landscape.

Think of this way: Every program in the Football Bowl Subdivision is chasing after the same pool of recruits; most programs recruit the same region as countless others; some programs offer hundreds of recruits to sign just 25 future student-athletes.

Boiled down, Zcruit’s goal is to assist a program’s efforts by streamlining the process — by taking all the streams of data at their disposal and creating a formula for recruiting success, in the same way a university’s admissions office attempts to pinpoint the best and most likely fits for the student body at large.

Three baseline factors are taken into account. The first is demographic information: background information, such as where a recruit is from. The second is a prospect’s interactions with the school, such as how many visits he has made on campus, whether he attended any camps or when the scholarship offer was tendered.

The third is the prospect’s interactions with other schools. Is he showing any interest? When was he offered by another school, when did he visit, how many times did he visit? In the end, the data compiled by Zcruit creates a threshold, for lack of a better word, between whether a program should recruit a player — if the data suggests he’s gettable — or whether it should move on to another prospect.

Zcruit claims a pretty good success rate, too.

Zcruit worked alongside Bowers and the coaching staff during this current recruiting cycle, helping the Wildcats identify and evaluate a number of recruits at positions of need. With one week until national signing day, the algorithms created by Zcruit have predicated which recruits would not sign with Northwestern with 94% accuracy; the same algorithms predicted which recruits would sign with the Wildcats with 80% accuracy.

Man, a program that could have predicted what my teenage daughters wouldn’t do over 90% of the time sure would have come in handy back then.  Just sayin’.

More power to you, guys.

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Wednesday morning buffet

Plenty to nosh on this morning…

• It sounds like Elijah Holyfield is having a tough time with his ankle injury.
• More Sony Michel is coming.
• The Egg Bowl is back on Thanksgiving.
• Mike Leach isn’t having a fun week.
• Missouri may be planning on giving Georgia a dose of its own version of old man football.
• Next year Georgia plays South Carolina in November.  Steve Spurrier doesn’t approve.
• If you’re interested, Fox Sports is broadcasting this week’s Ohio State-Oklahoma game in virtual reality to your smartphone.
• Good luck with this week’s pick ’em.
• Those of you who think the key to being a great college head coach is obsession might find this story about Urban Meyer of interest.
• What’s so scary about getting rid of the transfer eligibility rule?

He read it on the Internet, so it must be true.

Now this is what I call cutting edge preparation.

Auburn head coach Gus Malzahn played the role of mad scientist Saturday, sending out myriad personnel groupings in hopes of confounding Clemson’s defense. He employed three different quarterbacks, switching with reckless abandon and, at times, having all of them on the field at once. Auburn threw deep balls and ran the option. It played in spread formations and, believe it or not, ran a bit of old-school wing-T.

Clemson had answers for everything — even if some of those answers came in an unlikely way.

Clemson defensive coordinator Brent Venables had been “tipped off” — that was the extent of his explanation — that Auburn might run some Wing-T, and he hadn’t the slightest clue on how best to defend an offense rarely employed beyond the high school level. So, a day before the game, Venables sat down at his computer and did what we all might do in such situations.

“I literally Googled, ‘How to stop the wing-T,’” Venables admitted afterward.

Hey, whatever works.  And it must have, as Auburn’s running game was limited to 87 yards on 41 carries.

“Being connected through their device is their expectation whether it’s music or sports.”

The NFL embraces Wi-Fi connectivity at stadiums.  Of course, when you’re shaking down the taxpayers for new stadiums every few years, it’s a lot easier to integrate the newest technology into your infrastructure.  So it’s not clear if this is a trend that will trickle down to the next level quickly.

But don’t tell me this won’t resonate with colleges sooner or later.

More teams are monetizing their apps by selling merchandise, food and drinks to fans, as well as tickets for future games. This is another reason it’s important to have a strong Wi-Fi connection and plenty of beacons in place. The beacons pinpoint where a fan is located within the stadium. By knowing this, the team can send messages about discounts, whether on merchandise or hot dogs at that moment in the stadium. The beacons also allow the stadium to give helpful information to fans such as how long the nearest bathroom wait is going to be.

VenueNext and YinzCam are two mobile platform developers used by many professional teams and arenas to boost profits through additional sales and advertising. All of these options make it easier for fans to spend money, and for stadiums and teams to make money.

It would be so Georgia to charge fans for an app to let them know which bathrooms had the shortest wait.  Greg McGarity’s probably already on that mother.

(h/t Raleighwood Dawg)

Thursday morning buffet

The chafing dishes are tanned, rested and ready.

• Alabama’s strength and conditioning coach now makes more than twenty FBS head coaches and more than Florida’s offensive coordinator.
• Another reminder that early recruiting ratings aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.
• No doubt you’ll be pleased to learn that the SEC has just named a Coordinator of Football Replay.  At least he’s not Penn Wagers.
• Is helmet communication coming to college football?
• You want a stupid preseason college head coaches 1-128 ranking?  Athlon’s there for you.
• Student fees are climbing at a faster rate than tuition… and, “there was no significant relationship between athletics spending and fees”.
• Give Phil Steele credit for adjusting on the fly.

“We’re still using Etch A Sketch.”

The NFL has embraced the latest technology, but college football hasn’t.

While the NFL, which enters the third of a five-year sponsorship deal with Microsoft worth a reported $400 million that equips all 32 teams with Surface Pro tablets on the sideline and in the coaches’ box, will allow the use of video replay on the sideline during the preseason this year and Major League Baseball has a multi-year deal for the use of iPads in dugouts, the NCAA has been sorely behind when it comes to in-game technology.

High school football teams have embraced the latest technology, but college football hasn’t.

“I see high school teams in the state of Georgia that are replaying the previous series with their offensive line, with their backs, with their quarterback, on the sideline,” Muschamp said. “Certainly I think that’s something that would be beneficial for us. … To be able see a picture of a formation, and to be able to see a receiver split, to be able to see the split of an offensive tackle, all of those things are really critical to be able to do.

“Everything in pictures that you can draw up and be able to show a player that, it’s a much easier learning curve for a player as opposed to drawing it on a blackboard.”

Instead, welcome to the land of half-assed.

In February, the NCAA Football Rules Committee approved a proposal to allow electronic devices to be used for coaching purposes in the press box and locker room, but not on the sideline like in the NFL, during games beginning this fall. That proposal was approved a month later by the Playing Rules Oversight Panel, which in April, chose to delay implementation until 2017 after feedback from conference commissioners as to guidelines for consistency, cost and other issues.

“I think that’s part of the reason that the brakes were applied,” SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said earlier this month. “To say, ‘Let’s figure out exactly what might be implemented and how it can be implemented on an appropriately consistent basis.'”

All I can figure is that Sankey’s waiting for Microsoft to step up and offer him one of those sweet, sweet sponsorship deals.  In the meantime, enjoy the comedic stylings of SEC coaching.

Until some of the details are worked out, coaches are already searching for loopholes in how to maximize whatever technology ends up being implemented.

“I think that’s going to be one of those conversations that’s talked about the next couple of years,” Auburn coach Gus Malzahn said, “with the technology and where it’s going and what is going to be the plan moving forward in college football.”

As of now, a designated staffer or player could be in the locker room watching film and come to the sideline to relay information throughout a game. A quarterback could go to the locker room and watch film of the previous drive.

Bielema took that idea a step further.

“If we scored a touchdown our offensive unit could kind of just run into the locker room and grab a drink of water and maybe stay in there and watch a half a dozen plays, come back on the field before they’d be missed, which would be a huge, huge advantage,” Bielema said. “It’s the locker room. They just went in to use the facilities.

“I mean that’s the part of the SEC that I’ve begun to know. You’re going to take everything that you’ve given and kind of expand it a little bit.”

Closing the genius gap

I swear – if Paul Johnson didn’t exist, we’d have to invent him.

Paul Johnson is a leader at a school that lives on the cutting edge of science and technology.

In at least one aspect of his job, though, the Georgia Tech coach finds technology to be an unwelcome intrusion…

Johnson has an understandable opposition to a rule that would enable opposing coaches to watch in-game replays of his unorthodox offense.

“I think it takes away coaching,” he said in an interview earlier this year. “That was one of the things I always liked to think I was decent at, was looking out there and seeing what was going on. Now, anybody can do it if they can sit up there and look at the monitor and run it back.”

Buy a laptop and you, too, can be a head football coach, my friends.  Yes, apparently it’s that easy.

If only he could find a recruiting app.