Developing players to make your college team succeed and developing players to get drafted in the NFL aren't the same thing. But, I still love seeing stats like this, they don't tell the whole story but they are still informative.
I think it would have been more meaningful to see how many players made NFL rosters than how many were drafted.
There are some responses below the article that ring true. Kirk Ferentz does indeed need to get copies of that to all recruits he contacts. Since he does nothing with them and cannot win very much they can at least have a chance to play in the NFL in spite of his lack of coaching ability as spelled out in the article. For Ohio State they can emphasize the importance of selling your name and brand even when in college and it's illegal to do so. There are some BIG lessons to be learned up there for sure.
IMHO, a spurious analysis. Using his criteria, let's go to extremes: Assume a poor recruiting program (let's just say Iowa), has 80 players, all 2-stars, with an expectation (his rate) of 0.05 of them that would be drafted = 4 players should be expected. Say they get 6 drafted of the 80 instead of 4, their "development success ratio" is 150%. Wow. Take a major program, 80 players, and say they're all 5-star, 0.37 of them are expected to be drafted, or 30 are expected. Say 3 are either injured, quit, transfer, flunk out, are arrested, or die before their eligibility expires. This program's "development success ratio" is only 90%, even though they would have had 27 players drafted into the NFL. Obviously a failure of the program to develop talent. ??? I'm guessing that: 1) there are far fewer 5-star players than 2-star players, 2) 5-star players are in positions more likely to have career ending injuries (knees and shoulders for QBs, RBs, WRs) than 2-stars (2-star interior lineman can be "patched up" and still play in the NFL as compared to a QB with a broken throwing hand or separated shoulder), 3) the upside for 2-stars and below is far greater than the upside for 5-stars (can they become 6-star players?, duh) and since there are far fewer 5-stars, losing one player to a career-ending injury is far more damaging to the analysis than the benefit of having an unexpected 2-star get drafted in the 8th round. Most of his "top-10 development programs" are never in the top-10 recruiting lists (Cincinatti, Wake Forest???), but rank high on "development". Again, all it takes is a couple of unexpected 2-stars (.05 expectation each) out of 80 players to "make it" on these programs to make it look like they're better at player development than a major program who loses one 5-star (.37 expectation) due to injury. Certainly, USC for example, gets a load of 5-stars and also according to his analysis "develop" as measured by NFL draft percentage as compared to all programs. Fine. But this is a lot of number crunching on small numbers with questionable results. Yeah, "Wake Forest - A Program to Develop At".
I'd bet that losing 3 out of 80 guys isn't at all unusual ... A team that gets 80 five-stars and has 27 drafted is indeed doing worse than average.
I've said this before and I'll say it again: I wouldn't complain if Kirk Ferentz were the coach of UT football.
"I've said this before and I'll say it again: I wouldn't complain if Kirk Ferentz were the coach of UT football." He's almost been run out of Iowa City twice and he's a horrible human being, so... no.
My family friends have been involved with the Iowa program for 15+ years... one as a player and others as front office personnel/coaches. I stayed mere yards away from his hotel room at the Omni in San Antonio when we played them in the Alamo Bowl. I am not wrong about Ferentz.
How lucky for the Iowa blogger that his unbiased algorithm put his team at the top! What are the odds of that happening?
If I were a recruit, I'd probably be more interested in my expected NFL career dollar stats ranked by school - not so much draft position, but overall... what might I expect as a player at Texas, 0u, USC, Bama, tOSU...?
It always struck me that Ferenz was the most overpaid coach in Major College Football. I'd love to see some proof that I'm wrong. This analysis is a nice attempt but to me the proof is in the production on the field.
