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Returning Talent Revisited
Publication Date: February 7, 2006
We Don't Rebuild, Son, We Reload
Well, that didn't turn out so well.
Last week, I introduced a method of trying to spot the top teams in this preseason (yes, I know the season has started for many teams, bear with me here) based on identifying who had the largest productivity from last year returning. It was an interesting list, but I mentioned that in order to test it I'd like to look at last year with the benefit of hindsight to see how it did. Here are the top 25 in returning talent from 2004 to 2005:
# Team RCAA 1 South Carolina 133.63 2 College of Charleston 127.09 3 Georgia 122.56 4 Notre Dame 120.33 5 Louisiana State 104.25 6 William and Mary 92.86 7 Oral Roberts 89.85 8 Oregon State 88.73 9 George Mason 86.83 10 Baylor 85.56 11 Winthrop 85.40 12 Wichita State 84.07 13 Miami, Florida 83.92 14 Mississippi 78.20 15 Rice 77.04 16 Tulane 75.48 17 Dallas Baptist 75.26 18 Texas 73.11 19 Tennessee 66.91 20 Mississippi State 66.85 21 Vanderbilt 66.12 22 Louisiana-Lafayette 65.95 23 Army 65.62 24 Washington 62.66 25 Arizona State 61.18
Obviously, this doesn't resemble a reasonable postseason top 25 in any shape or fashion, so I'd say it's a writeoff, almost. While it's obviously not useful as a complete ranking tool, it did spot some teams that were completely missed by the preseason polls -- both Oregon State and Baylor show up in this top 10 despite being either missed completely by the polls or underrated by everyone but BA; this year, though, there aren't really any teams that match that profile of big-conference teams missing in the polls but present here. Overall, though, the twin killing of overemphasizing the value of star players and the inherent variability of player performance, especially at this age, limits its usefulness.
Just to pad a bit, and because it's mildly interesting, here's a chart of everyone in any of last year's preseason top 25's or the end-of-year ISR top 25:
Team BA CB ESPN NCBWA ISR Texas 4 1 1 1 2 Cal State Fullerton 3 3 2 2 3 Miami, Florida 5 2 3 4 26 Tulane 1 4 5 3 4 Louisiana State 2 5 4 6 20 Stanford 6 6 6 5 16 South Carolina 7 8 7 7 34 Georgia 10 9 8 10 47 Arizona State 9 11 9 9 9 Texas A&M 13 10 10 12 40 North Carolina 14 7 11 8 36 Arizona 12 12 12 14 13 Georgia Tech 19 13 15 11 18 Rice 18 15 14 13 11 Mississippi 16 16 18 17 6 Washington 8 17 12 15 22 Long Beach State 22 14 16 18 10 Florida State 27 18 19 16 25 Notre Dame 20 20 20 20 98 Florida 15 22 17 21 14 Vanderbilt 17 38 22 34 37 Clemson 36 21 23 23 23 Baylor 11 25 21 33 8 Oklahoma State 23 23 26 27 55 Arkansas 26 33 24 29 21 Wichita State 39 26 28 24 35 Mississippi State 28 19 27 19 27 Texas Christian 21 37 25 22 30 East Carolina 32 30 30 31 59 Virginia 35 27 29 32 57 Central Florida 37 24 36 25 70 Florida Atlantic 33 30 39 28 61 Oral Roberts 24 - 34 35 69 Winthrop 25 28 37 26 42 Oregon State - - - - 1 Southern California - - - - 5 Nebraska - - - - 7 Pepperdine - - - - 12 Cal Poly - - - - 15 San Francisco - - - - 17 California - - - - 19If you're interested in reprinting this or any other Boyd's World material for your publication or Web site, please read the reprint policy and contact me
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