After identical 2-10 records on the gridiron in 2014 and securing The Americans’ 10th- and 11th-ranked recruiting classes, are Tulsa and UConn destined to a life of bottom feeding in their respective divisions of the new 12-team AAC?
With the addition of Navy as a football-only member starting next season, the AAC is splitting into separate 6-team divisions, where each division champ will play in a conference championship game. The East Division will comprise of Cincinnati, ECU, South Florida, Temple, UCF, and UConn. Houston, Memphis, Navy, SMU, Tulane, and Tulsa will make-up the West.
We’ll look over a list of different stats related to recruiting and on-field success to help us figure out if Tulsa and UConn are set for a long stay in the basement, or like the Jeffersons, are moving on up.
All FBS conferences outside of the AAC, with the exception of Conference USA and the Sun Belt, is represented below by each member who finished last in their respective conference, or conference division, from 2010-2014 (five seasons). If teams tied for a last-place finish in a particular year, I chose the team with the worst overall record. The number of teams in the conference is listed to the right.
Each teams five-year average recruiting ranking within their conference, according to Rivals.com yearly rankings, is offset to the right of the program name.
How often a team had a last-place finish is in parenthesis.
Note: I left out C-USA and the Sun Belt because each league has been hit hard by conference realignment (replacing five or more members in the last three years), likely placing their team/recruiting rankings as major outlier to the other conference rankings. Also, I purposely left out Texas’ last-place finish in the Big 12 South in 2010 and Auburn’s seventh-place division finish in 2012. If you need an explanation, here you go: Texas just pulled in the Big 12’s top class, and Auburn had the SEC’s second-best in 2015. I mean, they’re Texas and Auburn. They’ll both finish near the bottom of their conference/division once every 15 years at the minimum.
ACC – 14
Syracuse – 12.4
Wake Forest – 12
Duke – 11.6
Boston College – 10.6
NC State – 9
Virginia (4) – 6.2
Big Ten – 14
Purdue (2) – 11.6
Northwestern – 11.4
Minnesota – 11.2
Illinois – 10
Iowa – 9.4
Indiana (3) – 8.8
Big 12 – 10
Kansas (4) – 8
Iowa State – 9.6
Pac-12 – 12
Washington State (4) – 10.8
Colorado (4) – 10.6
California – 5.6
SEC – 14
Kentucky (2) – 12.4
Vanderbilt (2) – 12
Arkansas (2) – 11
Ole Miss (2) – 8.8
Tennessee – 5.4
Mid-American – 13
Akron (3) – 10.4
Eastern Michigan (3) – 9.4
Miami – 8
Central Michigan – 6
Western Michigan – 4.4
Mountain West – 12
Air Force – 10
UNLV – 8.8
Hawaii (2) – 7.6
New Mexico (3) – 6.4
Thought we were done number-crunching? Not quite. Got another stack of stats for you to sift through.
- 48 of the last-place finishers from 2010-2014 had nine or more losses
Tulsa and UConn each went 3-9 and 2-10 the last two seasons (Tulsa played the 2013 season in Conference USA).
- Arkansas (7-6) is the only last-place finisher during the 2010-2015 period to end a season with a winning record (2014)
Each of the SEC West’s seven members went bowling in 2014, and the sixth- and seventh-place teams won bowl games; unprecedented results since the NCAA’s advent of division play and the conference championship game in 1992.
- Five of Rivals’ 2015 Top 250 prospects were from Connecticut (2) and Oklahoma (3)
The other seven states that comprise The American had a combined 109 prospects in Rivals’ Top 250 rankings: Florida (38), Texas (32), Louisiana (10), Ohio (10), North Carolina (8), Tennessee (6), and Pennsylvania (5).
So what do all these numbers, rankings, and records really mean? Before I sum it all up, let’s address a few of the aberrations from the five-year cycle.
Obviously we have several teams that deviate from the assumption that a conference’s last-place team would likely finish in the bottom two or three of its league in recruiting during a five-year cycle. Of the teams listed, Virginia, Indiana, California, Tennessee, New Mexico, and Western Michigan stand out.
Virginia has finished near the middle of the ACC in recruiting the last five years, but still managed to finish last (or tied for last) in the Coastal Division four times. Poor coaching is the best explanation for UVa’s odd trend. Virginia is one of the better recruiting areas in the ACC with 13 of Rivals’ Top 250 prospects coming from the state; the Cavaliers have too many coveted resources to finish near the bottom of the ACC on a yearly basis.
I listed Indiana because it has a higher five-year recruiting average than the other four last-place finishers in the Big Ten, even though it has finished last in the Big Ten, or in one of the conference’s divisions, three times. But an 8.8 cumulative recruiting average is still in the bottom-half of the 14 member league.
Cal, and Tennessee, more so, are unlikely to be perennial seller dwellers of their respective divisions, when you consider Cal’s fertile recruiting ground and Tennessee’s pedigree. The 2004 Golden Bears, led by QB Aaron Rodgers, finished in the Top 10 of the major polls, and the Vols played in an SEC Championship game as recently as 2007. Tennessee is also the SEC’s second-winningest program behind Alabama. Both programs have had plenty of recent success — on the field and in recruiting — for us to assume their one-time last-place division finishes in the last five years were anomalies, not the norm.
Call New Mexico the “Mid-major Virginia”: solid recruiter, but coaching might be an issue.
And Western Michigan’s recruiting rankings are skewed because the Broncos have earned the MAC’s top recruiting class the last two years. The jury’s still out on head coach PJ Fleck leading the Broncos to MAC Nirvana, but there’s no arguing that Fleck is one of the best recruiters in college football. If he wasn’t at WMU, perhaps the Broncos would have finished in the bottom half of the conference’s recruiting ranks.
Now, what do all the stats truly mean for predicting Tulsa and UConn’s fate in the AAC? The answer: nothing, but definitely something (what?).
It may mean “nothing” because stats can’t delineate fact. At the end of the day, saying teams that place low in their respective conference’s annual recruiting rankings during a five-year stretch will likely finish near the bottom of their conference on the field is only a correlation — there’s proof that it doesn’t always match up. Sometimes the most talented teams, according to all the recruiting services, underachieves or faces a multitude of injuries.
Raise your hand if you thought Auburn would play for the national title in 2013 a season removed from a 3-9 record and a last-place finish in the SEC West. Yep, not even the Tiger grads have their hands up.
As competitive as the Pac-12 South has been the last few years, 2014 division champ Arizona is an injury-bugged season away from a possible last-place finish in 2015.
Predicting a team’s on-field success based on statistics isn’t an exact science. If you ever guess right (all you people in the preseason who picked Ohio State to win the national title), thank God and your lucky stars. You either picked with homer blinds on, or you compiled the stats and made an educated guess.
And that’s where the “something” comes in. Cumulative stats can’t predict a team’s future with 100 percent accuracy, however it can elicit enough information for you to get a solid idea of where a team is headed.
Past success is the best predictor of future success, or so I’ve heard.
UConn might become to the AAC what Kansas is to the Big 12: a basketball school in a football-poor state (the Sunflower State produced no players in the Rivals Top 250), destined for annual gridiron mediocrity. Tulsa may follow a path similar to another small private school, Wake Forest, that’s dropped in a conference dominated by larger state universities. The Deacons won an ACC title when Jim Grobe walked the sidelines, but took a nosedive the few seasons leading up to his retirement.
On the flip side, UConn could one day become a “national recruiter” and attract talent from all 50 states, much like the Oregon Ducks, who are also in a talent poor state (one Oregon player in Top 250). Tulsa may become a version of Stanford and market its private school advantages as a recruiting tool.
Maybe UConn’s Bob Diaco and new Tulsa HC Philip Montgomery are the right coaches to defy the odds and bust their program’s low outside expectations; become Jim Grobes per se. Or, perhaps, not even Urban Meyer could make the Huskies and ‘Hurricane better than occasional bowl teams.
We can’t say for sure where each program is headed. All we have are stats, and at the moment, the stats are predicting an unsuccessful future for these programs in the new-look AAC.
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