Beyond Recruiting: Measuring coaching development and applying that to the Gators Dan Mullen

I spend a lot of time writing about recruiting. That’s because it is really important. But I also spend a lot of time on it because it is measurable.

I do believe that there are minimum recruiting benchmarks that need to be achieved to be successful. In the SEC, those benchmarks are considerably more aggressive than in any other conference.

But that doesn’t eliminate the need for player development. So the question becomes, how do you measure that development?

Well, there are potentially a couple of ways.

How does a program hold onto talent?

The first is to look at how well a program identifies talent and then holds onto it. This is because a program may recruit seven 5-star candidates. But often by the time that player would be making an impact on the field, he has transferred or (hopefully not) suffered an injury.

The chart shown to the right shows this for teams that have finished in the top-25 of the recruiting rankings in any of the past four years according to the 247Sports composite.

When you compare the average of the past four seasons versus the ranking for 2018 for the talent on the actual roster, we get an idea of which programs may be doing a better job of development than others.

This points out that Michigan – where Jim Harbaugh has been criticized a lot – has actually shown very good development under this specific staff. That’s because while Harbaugh has had classes that have averaged 18th nationally, his 2018 roster had the 10th most talent in the country.

That means that the blue-chip players that he is recruiting are panning out more often than similar blue-chip players at other programs. Now, you can criticize Harbaugh for being 0-7 against Ohio State, but there isn’t any doubt that the Buckeyes are more talented.

Some of this also points to the recruiting ability of a particular coach. For example, Dan Mullen was able to convince Cece Jefferson and Martez Ivey to return to school for their senior seasons. That’s part of the reason why Florida’s talent level was rated higher than its national recruiting ranking.

That does mean we need to be careful. A staff who recruits well and doesn’t have players going to the NFL is going to see a larger difference than a staff that recruits at the same level but develops players who go to the next level.

But I do think that looking at specific teams – particularly Clemson – tells us something about the development ability of Dabo Swinney.

According to this chart, Swinney has averaged a national recruiting ranking of 10.8 over the past four seasons. But his team was the sixth most talented team in the country this season. That points towards Swinney’s ability to identify talent and get those players to produce on the field.

Indeed, if you look at just the 5-star recruits that Swinney has brought in over the past four seasons, the level of production is really impressive.

2018

• QB Trevor Lawrence – just threw for 3280 yards and led the team to a national championship as a true freshman
• DL Xavier Thomas – 8.5 TFL, 3.5 sacks as a true freshman
• DL K.J. Henry – 2 TFL as a true freshman
• WR Derion Kendrick – 15 Rec, 210 yards as a true freshman
• OL Jackson Carman – Played in 11 of 12 games prior to playoff as true freshman

2017

• WR Tee Higgins – 59 rec., 936 yards and 12 TD in 2018
• QB Hunter Johnson – transferred prior to season

2016

• DL Dexter Lawrence – 7 TFL, 1.5 sacks in 2018; 18 TFL, 10 sacks in 3 years

2015

• WR Deon Cain – Drafted in 2018 draft, 130 rec., 2040 yards, 20 TD in career
• OL Mitch Hyatt – First team All-American in 2017 and 2018
• DL Christian Wilkins – First team All-American in 2018, 14 TFL, 5.5 sacks in 2018

So in four years, Swinney has signed 11 5-star recruits. Ten of them have produced on the field for Clemson and a bunch of them have produced at All-American levels. In fact, the only player who didn’t produce much on the field for the Tigers was Hunter Johnson, and I think most Clemson fans will forgive Swinney for brings in Lawrence to compete for the QB position.

How does a program perform versus talent acquisition?

The second way to look at development is to examine how a program performs versus the talent that it’s brought in.

Again, Clemson and Swinney look good using this metric because the Tigers usually rank around 10th nationally recruiting but are competing for a national championship regularly. While I do think being in the ACC has a lot to do with the Tigers success, I also don’t deny that Swinney is doing a great job developing his players.

Of course, this also doesn’t give Nick Saban a whole lot of credit, as Alabama also is constantly competing for championships. But that is expected largely because of the level of recruiting.

And that’s where I think we can use this metric to examine coaches who are in similar situations. The chart below looks at new coaches in FBS this season who took over programs that have had at least one top-25 recruiting class in the past four seasons.

The chart above compares the recruiting average from 2015-2018 for each program compared to its final AP Poll ranking for 2018. If the school did not receive votes in the AP Poll, then I used the ESPN FPI ranking so we could get a feel for how much better or worse the 2018 season was compared to its recruiting ranking.

By this metric, Dan Mullen grades out really, really well.

That shouldn’t be a surprise to Gators fans, who know that Mullen turned around last year’s 4-7 squad. But it’s more than that. Mullen outperformed the Gators recruiting ranking by 7.5 spots. No other new coach outperformed his program’s recruiting ranking at all.

It also shouldn’t escape our attention that the bottom name on that list is one of Florida’s biggest rivals, Florida State coach Willie Taggart. Again, it’s pretty clear that Taggart’s first year in Tallahassee didn’t go very well as the Seminoles missed its first bowl game in 36 seasons.

But by all measures, this is a dumpster fire. It’s not just that Florida State wasn’t any good. It’s that FSU had an average national recruiting rankings from 2015-2018 of 5.8, had the fifth most talented roster in 2018 and was still terrible. This is a team that should be competing with Clemson, but instead was barely able to beat Samford and got run off the field by Florida.

But before Florida fans get too excited about these numbers, a word of caution. Over long stretches of time, elite coaches typically have average recruiting rankings that match average FPI rankings. Dan Mullen is no different.

If we look at Mullen’s record at Mississippi State and Florida and compare the average national recruiting ranking from the previous four years with the ESPN FPI ranking, there is quite a bit of noise in the data. Some years Mullen’s teams are a lot better and some year’s they are quite a bit worse.

But overall, his average national recruiting ranking is 28.6 and his average FPI finish is 28.6. This means that Mullen is going to have really good teams at Florida, as the Gators are likely going to end up recruiting near a top-10 level if this cycle is any indication.

But this data also indicates that Mullen will have trouble consistently competing with Alabama.

This has nothing to do with Mullen. The numbers show that teams ranked 1-10 in talent win 38.5 percent of games against teams more talented and 78.9 percent against teams less talented. That winning percentage drops to 34.4 percent for teams ranked 11-20 in talent.

Perhaps there’s no better example of this than the Iron Bowl. Auburn consistently recruits at a top-10 level but is 4-8 (33.3%) versus Alabama during the Saban era. Auburn has played for the national championship twice in that time and has won once. But also during that time, Alabama has played for the national championship seven times and won five.

Takeaway

Coming into this season Mullen had won 40 percent of his games against more talented opponents and 84 percent against less talented. Mullen added to that this year, going 3-1 (75%) against more talented teams in 2018 (LSU, Georgia, FSU and Michigan) and 7-2 (78%) against less talented teams.

The truth is that the loss to Georgia was acceptable. The losses to Missouri and Kentucky were not, or at least won’t be moving forward.

Florida likely will only play three teams with more composite talent in 2019: LSU, Georgia and FSU. If Mullen can go 2-1 in those games, the Gators have a chance for a really special season.

And there are indications that he’ll be able to get that done. He has Feleipe Franks returning at QB. In Mullen’s three best seasons at Mississippi State (2014, 2015 and 2017), he had a returning starter at QB who had played well in spurts but been inconsistent the year prior. That should sound familiar to Gators fans.

Major pieces are back for an offense that improved from 104th to 32nd in yards per play against FBS opponents. Will that experience drive further improvement?

And that’s really the question for 2019. There is no doubt that the team improved. The question is now that both the offense and defense took major steps forward in 2018, has the talent been maximized or will the players be able to improve similarly to the improvement seen between 2017 to 2018?

This does mean that it’s worth considering that recruiting isn’t the only factor for a winning program. In fact, most of us who focus on recruiting rankings don’t believe that anyway.

The point is that Mullen’s track record indicates that his floor with top-10 talent is likely approximately that of Auburn; two SEC Championships each decade. Florida fans will have to decide whether that is an acceptable amount of winning for their program.

Or Mullen will have to prove he’s a significantly better coach than either Gene Chizik and Gus Malzahn.