UM Basketball Recruiting Database (Vol 2)
Earlier this year I posted a Diary (link) about basketball recruiting where I created a database similar to the one Seth has for football that captures all Michigan basketball recruits dating back to the Fab Five era. If you refer to the link you can have comment access to the Google Spreadsheet if you want to help me fill in some of the older information or offer other ideas for improvements.
When I posted this before it was around the time Isaiah Todd and Josh Christopher were about to make their decisions. Now that Coach Howard actually has signed four recruits to the next class I thought it would be a good time to update it. I added all of the 247-composite star ratings and composite ratings going back to 2003 (as far as 247 goes). Here's a visual depiction of the classes in that timeframe:
A few observations I made about the ratings since putting this together:
- Frankie Collins (0.9761) ranks right between our previous four-year starting PGs Derrick Walton (0.9833) and Xavier Simpson (0.9748).
- Hunter Dickinson is Juwan's highest rated recruit so far (0.9845) and that slots in between Iggy (0.9859) and Courtney Sims (0.9845).
- The overall high ratings and tight spread of the four 2021 recruits stands out above almost every other class in this data set for quantity and quality. Individual players ranked higher, but the overall class so far is impressive. The 2013 class (Irvin, Walton, Donnal) and 2003 class (Harris, Petway, Sims) are the only ones that jump out ahead. What's interesting about that is that both of those classes produced productive 4-year players but neither produced any NBA talent (with the exception of a few games from Sims and Walton).
- GR3 is the highest rated player in the 247 era (0.9934) and that is even ahead of Todd (0.9924). Dion Harris is next (0.9902).
- Interestingly, I removed transfers from this graph because it skewed things with Chaundee Brown (0.9863) and Charles Matthews (0.9766) standing out more than most of our recent HS recruits.
- Speaking of transfers, Mike Smith had no recruiting rankings out of HS that I could find but preferred walk-on Jaron Faulds (0.8588) ranks ahead of some of our favorite Beilein-era players like Jordan Morgan (0.8559), Spike (0.8556), Stu Douglas (0.8556), and Zack Novak (0.8556).
Feedback is always welcome. And if anyone has some old magazines from the 1990s lying around that show recruiting rankings I'd love to include that in this data.
August 24th, 2020 at 11:27 AM ^
Thanks. This is really interesting. I would be curious to see average rankings for each class (though I realize this metric is less applicable in basketball than football as basketball has much smaller classes).
I've always pushed back a bit on the notion that Beilein recruited only "under the radar" guys. While some of the higher ranked players rose up after committing (GRIII being the first that comes to mind) GRIII, McGary, Chatman (regardless of how he panned out), Brazdekis, Irvin, Johns, etc. were recognized as a significant recruits at the time.
Also, unless I'm misreading the Google sheet linked in the prior post, it shows Daniel Horton as NR. My recollection was that he was a McDonald's All-American.
August 25th, 2020 at 8:19 AM ^
Good question on Horton. My memory was that he was a high 4-star as well, but as far as I can tell in the Rivals site there's no "rank" listed so I put him as NR. It could be that dating back that far they didn't do ranks or you need premium access.
As for average class rank, that's an interesting metric. Let me play around with it and see if I can calculate it easily.
Beilein went after highly ranked players strategically, but his true claim to fame was finding guys that were under-rated before they blew up or helping them maximize their potential. McGary was the true 5-star he landed that was ranked top-10 at the time of the recruitment. Zak Irvin was also ranked reasonably from the beginning. While Iggy was arguably a top-40 player himself, the fact that he wasn't rated by two services still supports Beilein finding a market opportunity to me.
August 25th, 2020 at 8:33 AM ^
Here you go - thank you pivot tables.
This shows the 2003 and 2013 classes standing out as described in the OP. The other class that jumped out was 2007, which consisted only of Manny Harris (0.9861) and Kelvin Grady (0.9287). I guess technically 2004 is higher than Juwan's two classes but that was a class of only Ron Coleman (0.9622).
August 26th, 2020 at 6:04 PM ^
Interesting. It is frustrating to work with data like this where some of the sample sizes for a given year may be only one or 2 player classes. As you stated, a single player class could skew results considerably. Obviously we can’t just throw out all classes that land only one or 2 guys, though. Thanks for doing all the grunt work!
October 19th, 2020 at 7:41 AM ^
Extremely interesting especially looking back in reference to some of the new developments on the recruiting trail
Comments