Last year during his time away from Our Lady’s univesity, ND Quarterback Everett Golson spent ten weeks with highly regarded quarterbacks coach George Whitfield of Whitfeld Athletix, San Diego. Whitfield has worked with a number of high profile talents including Cam Newton, Andrew Luck, and Johnny Manziel. Golson came back from that experience bigger, stronger, and with a better grip on the football..

Notice Golson’s fingers positioned over the laces. (Photo: https://www.facebook.com/whitfieldathletix/)

Last week, Golson reunited with Whitfield  as he attended Whitfield’s #QBSharkWeek camp. About a dozen elite talents from across the Division 1 landscape were at SharkWeek including QB’s Baylor’s Bryce Petty, Michigan State’s Connor Cook, and LSU’s Brandon Harris. It certainly was a great opportunity to shake off some of the rust from a somewhat underwhelming Blue-Gold Game performance for Golson and measure himself against some of the best QB talent in the country.

Media coverage of the camp is understandably sparse given the proprietary nature of camps like those offered by Whitfield Athletix. Perhaps the best insights any fans can glean are from tweets by coaches and attendees. If the #QBSharkWeek tweets are any indication, it was a lot of reading defenses, sprint outs, and #grinding as well as appearances by guests like Marshall Faulk, Mike Haynes, and Dana Bible. Whitfield’s formula has a proven track record and we’ll all get a chance to see how it pays off for #5 this fall. With success on the recruiting trail, the reinstatement of WR Davaris Daniels, FIELD TURF(!!!) and Golson’s offseason workouts there is a lot to be excited about in 2014.

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Last weekend’s annual Blue-Gold Game showcased the considerable talents of Notre Dame’s top two quarterbacks, Everett Golson and Malik Zaire. Instead of crabbing about a supposed quarterback controversy the Irish faithful should be extremely pleased. For the first time in his tenure, Brian Kelly has a QB “controversy” of his own intentional creation, one which pits two very similar, highly dynamic quarterbacks against each other for the starting position. The Golson/Zaire competition is qualitatively different from the previous four seasons and the program is better for it by far.

Kelly’s tenure has been marked by QB units comprised of players possessing highly disparate skill sets: Crist, Rees, Hendrix, Golson, heck throw in Kiel, too. Each of these guys brought an idiosyncratic blend of strengths and weaknesses to the table making ranking the QB position, while never easy, fraught with even more difficulty.

Coaches must base decisions about playing time on the various strengths of each player. That much is obvious and is a fairly straightforward (though not a simple) process. Each player will be stronger on some criteria (accuracy, arm strength, decision making, mobility, etc.) and weaker on others . But when you have a position group where the mix of strengths and weaknesses is so utterly dissimilar– as has been the case at ND the past four seasons– your prior philosophical commitments about how best to optimize across categories (i.e. how much weight you assign the various criteria) in making your decision becomes that much more important.  

Golson and Zaire’s similar skill sets significantly reduce the complexity of the decision by turning variables into constants that drop out of the analysis. Consider the following (admittedly) gross oversimplification looking at numbers 5 and 8:  mobility/escapability- Check, check; Arm Strength- Check, check; Capability running option- Check, check, “Gripping laces”- Check, check.

In the language of decision theory this reduces the “criterion space” for evaluation and consequently increases the confidence level in the decision.  When you don’t have to make uncertain decisions on how to optimize across competing criteria, e.g., when it’s not a question of “explosive upside” versus “steady game management” (or however you want to frame the QB controversies of the past four seasons) you’re that far ahead of the game.  It’s sort of a more formal way of stressing the importance of having guys who “fit your system.”

How? It brings simplicity and repetition to valuable practice time increasing competence and cohesion of the entire offense.  It means no major adjustments to the offense if a QB goes down (apart from Golson being right-handed, and Zaire being a lefty) or subsequent major adjustments to the gameplan since the install stays basically the same. Etc. etc.

In the Golson versus Zaire competition, it doesn’t really matter who comes out ahead in the coaches’ minds. That will sort itself out. But I for one have far more confidence that when  a decision is ultimately reached whatever it is likely represents the true optimal choice for the program.  

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Well, at HLS we strive to bring you what you want.

In the table below I looked at the four year recruiting data for every program on Notre Dame and Alabama’s schedule. (I’d love to do it for a lot of other programs but getting the data together for even one team is tedious to say the least and I fully expect this pattern to hold for all the top programs). The entries below represent 1) the conference blue chip ratios from last week’s piece, 2) the four year blue chip ratios for all AQ conference opponents played, and 3) the four year ratios for all programs on their respective schedules.

How do you interpret this data? Well I think the reason most people asked me to include the non-AQ teams in the earlier analysis was the presumption there would be an even narrower gap between ND and the top SEC programs (and a corresponding widening gap between ND and the other power conferences but analyzing those are for another day). The reason being that the teams on the softer part of ND’s schedule would presumably still be tougher (i.e. recruit better) than the open dates your typical SEC program schedules against various directional schools from the Southern Conference. And there is indeed a slight narrowing, but it only amounts to just a 1.2 percentage point difference which is pretty insignificant.

This says more about the shortcomings of a simple measure like the blue chip ratio than it does about ND’s opponents. The blue-chip ratio treats all the variation at the 3 star level and below as the same and clearly it isn’t. Just using the blue chip ratio there is a miniscule difference between programs like BYU and Navy on one hand and Chattanooga and Western Carolina on the other. Why? Because with the exception of less than a handful of 4 star recruits for BYU over a two year period on ND’s schedule, none of those programs have been able to land any blue chip prospects. At all. Nada. Zip. Zilch. But no one would take that information and claim Chattanooga recruits at the same level as BYU in real life.

The blue-chip ratio is good at looking at elite talent recruited by the top programs but pretty meaningless when trying to assess the overall attractiveness of a program that signs a lot of solid three star recruits. And those three star recruits help a program win games, making life much tougher for opponents.

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Notre Dame is swimming in blue chips. How well do our opponents recruit?

With National Signing Day now in the rear view mirror, we can see Coach Kelly and company have put together another strong class. This group not only passes the eyeball test but its reflected in the rankings of the various national recruiting sites. The ever helpful folks at 247 Sports assembled composite ratings from all the major recruiting sites and ND comes in with a very respectable 10th place for its class of 2014.

This week over at SB Nation Bud Elliot had a nice piece looking at what he called the “blue chip ratio”, or the number of 4 and 5 star recruits over the total number of kids signed.

5 star + 4 star / total signees

The number to look out for was anything north of 50%, which means that over half the players signed by a program were rated as 4 or 5 star prospects. Only eleven programs had managed that feat over the past four years and Notre Dame was one of them. The Irish came in 4th overall according to this metric, behind only Alabama, Ohio State, and USC and ahead of the likes of LSU, Texas, FSU, Michigan, and assorted college football royalty.

At the end of the piece Elliot goes on to rank entire conferences according to the blue chip ratio. Of course the SEC comes out ahead–by a WIDE margin. Over the last four years of all recruits committing to SEC programs, 34% of them were either 4 or 5 star players. Alabama led the way with a number north of 70%.

But how does ND’s competition stack up in the recruiting wars?  I compiled the recruiting data from every opponent on ND’s schedule the last four years to see how they fared on the blue chip ratio used by Elliot. The data included the recruiting class signed for that program the season they appeared on ND’s schedule.  Then I went through and eliminated all programs from non AQ conferences (meaning no Temple, Rice or service academies). So how well do ND’s rivals fare in the recruiting wars?

The answer is pretty darn good.

The table below gives the data on the “blue chip ratio” for the power conferences as well as the numbers for ND’s opponents (2011-14) which for our purposes I’ve called CONFERENCE ND. Once again this is the number of 4 and 5 star recruits divided by number of signees over the past four seasons. Here’s how it shakes out:

While I thought we’d creep a little closer to the SEC (which remains the most popular destination for blue chip players by a considerable margin) Notre Dame’s typical slate of opponents recruit 4 and 5 star players at a rate higher than any other non-SEC conference. Hardly a surprise providing even more evidence that the ND-doesn’t-play-anyone canard is empty bluster.

Notre Dame plays a brand name schedule. Always has, always will.

UPDATE 2/21/14

Conference ND just got a whole lot stronger. Why? Cause I realized today I’d left ND’s recruiting data out of the analysis and only had in the opponents. <Doh!> Does SB Nation exclude Ohio State from the B1G in their data? Is Alabama left out of the SEC? Of course not. By definition Conference ND NEEDS Notre Dame. As a result Conference ND looks even stronger. Let’s update that table shall we?

That’s more like it. Carry on with your Friday routine.

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