Legal Commentary

The importance of recruiting classes

By Tom Kirkendall

The institutionalized fanaticism that is college football recruiting reached its annual zenith yesterday as hundreds of the nation's best high school senior football players signed National Letters of Intent with various big-time college football programs. It never fails to amaze me how much interest the competition between big-time college programs for 17 and 18 year-olds generates among the supporters of those programs.

But as this earlier post noted, there is no doubt that it is important to the success of the programs. For example, over the past decade, the respective programs of the University of Texas and Texas A&M have mostly been going in the opposite direction, UT up and A&M down. This Suzanne Halliburton/Austin-American Statesman article reviews the past ten UT recruiting classes, while Ryan over at TAMABINP does the same here with regard to A&M's recruiting classes over the same period. As noted earlier here, A&M remains well a decided step below UT in the overall quality of its recruiting classes.

By the way, this website developed by three Stetson School of Business and Economics at Mercer University economists contains information about an econometric football recruiting model that predicts the collegiate choices of high school football players. Check it out.

Full post as published by Houston's Clear Thinkers on February 07, 2008 (boomark / email).