Hosted on shinyapps.io here.
Unlike any other major sports league, college football relies almost entirely on recruiting high school age players. There are numerous challenges that come with recruiting these young athletes, especially if you are a small school or a school with limited recent success. Factors such as location, coaching staff, official visits, and recent bowl games all play a role in advertising schools for prospective recruits. Regular season success captures the attention of many recruits, especially since the regular season is when many players build their resume for careers in the NFL.
This app helps us explore the relationship between regular season wins and recruiting success for different teams over the past few years.
The metric for recruiting success is the Talent Composite Score taken from 247Sports. The score is one number describing a team's entire roster at the beginning of the season. It takes into account the indivudal ratings of the players from a variety of recruiting websites and journals.
We can select teams to include in our plot by picking from the conference dropdown and using the checkboxes. There is also an option within every conference to select all teams at once.
We can also display multiple teams from multiple conferences at the simulataneously.
We can also select a year range to display. Picking only one year creates a scatterplot while selecting multiple years displays a talent-win trajectory.
Lastly, mousing over the points brings up a tooltip that includes the head coach (or coaches) for that team during that season.
Using this app, we can make visualizations like the one to the one below.
While Michigan and Ohio State might think of themselves as equal footed rivals, recent history has put a significant gulf in between the Wolverines and Buckeyes, both in wins and talent score.
Penn State meanwhile has made a remarkable rebuild, shooting up and past Michigan in recent success. Michigan State has had a large flucturation in wins which seems to have impacted their talent levels somewhat. And poor Rutgers, you'll make it back someday!