You would expect that the better-performing teams would produce more players, but is this the case? And if there is a relationship, do some college teams produce even more NFL players than you would expect, given their average end-of-season rankings? (And vice versa.)
Methodology: source comes from sportingcharts.com and Coaches Poll end of season ranking. NFL Players Association says the average NFL career is about 3.5 years, so for the 2016 season, most of the players would likely be those who were seniors in 2012-2015. Therefore the "ranking" here is the averaged end-of-season ranking for those years. The perennial problem of these analyses is how to count unranked years and most other analyses assign "26" for ranking when the team is unranked, which is what I do here.
Yes, there's a trend, and it's as you'd expect. For every one-step improvement in the average ranking over that four year period, you send on average 1.7 more players to the NFL. You can see that there are outliers:
Michigan, Oregon, and Navy under-produce NFL players, relative to their rankings.
Florida, Florida State, LSU and and Georgia over-produce players, given their rankings.
So if you go to an SEC school, it doesn't even matter if you win!
To see if my methodology is sound, I should do multiple four-year sets of ranking averages (2011-2014, 2010-2013, etc.) compared to the 2015 NFL roster and 2014 roster respectively, etc. and then see if the fit is WORSE when mismatched (i.e., 2011-2014 should determine the 2015 roster better than 2014 and 2016) but I'm not getting paid for this am I.
I could speculate about the reasons for this - whether under-producing means good coaching (or bad), same for recruiting, or non-NFL (or non-football) careers pursued by athletes at the "under-producing" schools, etc. But the under- and over-production by conference is interesting in itself.
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