As a Florida Gator fan, I hear a lot of fans groan about UF’s current recruiting. I understand it. From a composite ranking point of view, UF is doing quite well nationally, but is middle of the pack in the SEC (7th ranked in terms of team talent on roster in 2019, https://247sports.com/Season/2019-Football/CollegeTeamTalentComposite/?Conference=SEC). A lot of fans are also very happy with the improvement of the team since Dan Mullen took over, and expect the team to continue to improve and make a championship run. I’m an optimist, so I’ll go with the latter. But, to see where UF currently sits relative to previous SECCG participants, I took a look at the 4-year moving average (MA) of recruit ratings for each SEC team going back to 2003. And for fun, I looked at the SECCG results and found some interesting superlatives, which I put at the bottom of this post.

The density chart below shows the 4-yr MA for each team that has participated in the SECCG since 2003:

The vertical lines are the averages for each group. You can see the distribution is left-skewed. The outliers, as determined using Median Absolute Deviation (MAD) were all on the low end. I kept them in, as I don’t need a Gaussian distribution for this effort.

UF’s current 2020 MA (blue vertical line) is between the average winner MA (green vertical line) to the right and average loser MA (red vertical line) to the left. The scores on the x-axis are standardized by year to control for fluctuation in national ratings. Here is the data table:

Florida’s current 2020 MA for average recruit rating is 90.41, which is 1.692 standard deviations above the national average. Looking at that same data table with heat mapping on the scores, you can see how teams have ebbed and flowed over the years:

A couple things are obvious from the table above. The first is that the SEC got much better overall around 2009-2010, Another is that UF clearly faded a bit from 2015-2018 in terms of 4-year MA. Back to the point: How does UF’s current average recruit rating (RR) rank relative to previous SECCG participants:

This bar chart shows the 4-year MA for RR of winners (orange) and losers (blue) of the SECCG since 2003. UF 2020 is the green bar.

Here is the same data by year, which shows the difference between the opponents:

Clearly there have been some talent disparities in the SECCG. The biggest disparity occurred when Missouri (4-yr MA of 85.15, Std_Score of 0.764) played Alabama (4-yr MA of 93.12, Std_Score of 2.421) in 2014.

Where Florida Stands Now vs History:

Florida’s current 4-yr MA is 90.41, or 1.7 standard deviations above the national average. This would put the current UF roster in the 65th percentile of historical (2003-present) SECCG participants. UF would be in the 54th percentile of SECCG winners and in the 76th percentile of SECCG losers.

Some Superlatives:

Way to go, dawgs.

Various data sets:

credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEC_Championship_Game

We can all infer that not all position groups impact the outcome of a season equally. This could be due to numbers (5 OL vs 1 or 2 TE) or nature of importance (QB vs long snapper). I’ve already looked at the correlation between talent level and outcome by whole roster and by offense vs defense. So this time, I just broke the same data down a little further by position groups.

Each scatter plot below has a box that shows the correlation and effect size. The correlation is how closely the two variables (2019 win % and average composite talent rating for that team’s position group) are related. The effect size (technically, a coefficient of determination, but that can be interpreted as effect size in regression) essentially shows how reliable that correlation is. Every relationship was statistically significant at 0.06 or lower.

Offensive Line:

Running Back:

Wide Receiver:

Tight End:

Defensive Line:

Linebacker:

Defensive Back:

Quarterback:

QB was done differently due to sample sizes. When I used the average rating of all QBs on each roster, the outcome was random. In situations like Florida, where the highest rated QB was not the starter, the highest rated was used (So, Feleipe Franks for UF). Of course, this doesn’t make sense on the surface, but I surmised that using the highest ranking individual is a general indicator of how good the QB situation is for a team. If that QB gets beat out by a lower rated player, then the lower rated player may have been undervalued (or the higher rated player was a bust…). Either way though, using the highest rated player at the QB position had some value, so I used it. If you have a better explanation (and I hope you do), feel free to share.

Position Group Effect Table

Here is a table summarizing effect size by position

Surprising to me, is that the LB position group had the strongest correlation to win % for SEC teams in 2019. Keep in mind, this isn’t how important a position group is to winning – this is how well the composite rating of that position correlates to winning. Most of us would agree that effective QB play is key to winning. Here is that output visually in a radar graph:

Expectations:

Expectations scores around zero, whether positive or negative should be considered as meeting the expectations. Here is the table with each team’s total:

Looking at each team’s performance relative to expectations by position group is a neat way to peer into how well the on-field coaching is. It is important to note that teams with higher talent ratings will have harder times surpassing expectations and it will be easier to fail expectations. Not surprisingly, LSU had the best on-field coaching performance. Winning all your games and a Natty should cement that. Relative to their on-roster talent levels, Florida was second only to LSU. Imagine what Dan Mullen could do with elite talent… he’s already not far off with the talent he has.

Takeaway:

Dan Mullen is probably the best on-field coach in the SEC. I am skeptical LSU will have anywhere near the success they had last year when they caught lightning in a bottle. I expect Saban and Alabama to return to the top of the West. Georgia can recruit like crazy, but just doesn’t perform up to that talent level. They are a good team, that should be great.

I would focus hand-wringing over recruiting on QB, WR, and LB. The need for an elite QB is a given (though nothing I found here would indicate that, likely because of the small number of rated QBs on a given roster). But if 2020 holds form with 2019, LB roster talent and WR roster talent will more strongly predict win percentage. RB and TE position groups are the weakest predictors. We will see how this holds up in 2020.