Great defense without great talent

[JTrain]

Since we got off on a recruiting rankings tangent, here are the top 20 BCS AQ teams of the last 10 seasons by winning %:

 

1 Louisiana State

2 Ohio State

3 Oklahoma

4 Texas

5 Southern Cal

6 Oregon

7 Virginia Tech

8 Wisconsin

9 Alabama

10 Florida

11 Georgia

12 Auburn

13 West Virginia

14 Louisville

15 Cincinnati

16 Florida State

17 Oklahoma St.

18 Clemson

19 Missouri

20 South Carolina

 

Now go back and look at the Rivals or Scout rankings from 2002-2012. How many of these teams were consistently getting top 25 recruiting classes? I would say all of them but the Big East/AAC teams. So if you want to win consistently with this group, either recruit great classes or join the AAC.

[JTrain]

devnet,

 

Can you show me where the post "concludes that Nebraska is an anomaly which has consistently had better production from lower ranked recruits"? Again, it analyzed ONE SEASON of actual on-the-field results. That's what you meant by production, right? Not the recruiting rankings production, but the actual wins and losses.

[JTrain]

Two things:

 

1. You misunderstood the blog post you linked, and are now skirting around the point.

 

2. It's my thread and I'll troll it if I like!

 

[Stumpy1]

It has been hashed and rehashed on here dozens of times that the first few recruiting classes for Bo were not good especially on the defensive side of the ball. More specifically the D line.

 

That has improved drastically and those recruits came into this year extremely young with no experience. We saw drastic improvement as the year went on. That will carry over into next year even more when we add some of the JUCO players we have recruited.

 

Also, if you wait a couple months, this will be discussed again.

 

define drastic?.....somewhat improved, drastic?......not even close. and shame on Bo for being a defensive minded coach and not recruiting big name defensive players.....that's on him.

It's apparent that you don't pay attention to recruiting and/or the games very closely.

[In the Deed the Glory]

So, will we finally break through in 2014? And if so, how/why? Will we have a defensive team with great talent like 2009 and 2010, or will Bo and Pap find a way to make a great defense out of talent that is merely good?

I don't think so. One reason is that Bo doesn't seem to be particularly concerned with defensive stats during our non-conf warm-up games at the beginning of the season. Look at this past year. Wyoming racked up 600 yards and 35 points. South Dakota State had 465 yards and 20 points. (We did pin Southern Miss' ears back--but UCLA, our one decent non-conf game ran up and down the field on us.) To have a good statistical year we would need to hold these non-conf teams to about half this production. Instead, I think Bo is more concerned about playing a bland defense in our first couple of non-conf games that doesn't give anything away on film to the later B1G teams we play. Just look back at how much more aggressive we were at going for the QB in our last couple of games vs. our first four games. At least that's my theory. (Or maybe we had so many new starters that we didn't play as aggressive at the beginning of the year?? It could be that.)

 

 

I'm sure Bo would have loved to come out and shut down every offense to under 200 total yards all year. However, he didn't have that luxury this year because he really didn't know what he had in some players until they got into the heat of battle all together. when you have a front seven that has very little to no playing time together, it takes time. They were scrambling the first half of the year on defense and I personally think they did a dang good job with what they were trying to do with such young players.

 

After about half way through the season, they started realizing who the playmakers can be at various positions and we saw improvement.

Yeah, that might just be it. We'll find out this season if he plays all bland again without any pressure on the QB. OTOH, it makes more sense to pressure a newb QB like Mason of Georgia than Brett Smith of Wyoming or Brett Hundley of UCLA.

 

I would politely disagree. You can play more coverage with Mason because he can't quite diagnose it yet. Guys like Hundley and Smith? They will pick your coverage apart. You have to pressure them to mess with timing and shorten coverage time for the secondary.

[Hunter94]

It has been hashed and rehashed on here dozens of times that the first few recruiting classes for Bo were not good especially on the defensive side of the ball. More specifically the D line.

 

That has improved drastically and those recruits came into this year extremely young with no experience. We saw drastic improvement as the year went on. That will carry over into next year even more when we add some of the JUCO players we have recruited.

 

Also, if you wait a couple months, this will be discussed again.

 

define drastic?.....somewhat improved, drastic?......not even close. and shame on Bo for being a defensive minded coach and not recruiting big name defensive players.....that's on him.

It's apparent that you don't pay attention to recruiting and/or the games very closely.

• it was painful to watch this defense get gashed by UCLA and lowly Minnesota.......among others.
  

[JTrain]

It has been hashed and rehashed on here dozens of times that the first few recruiting classes for Bo were not good especially on the defensive side of the ball. More specifically the D line.

 

That has improved drastically and those recruits came into this year extremely young with no experience. We saw drastic improvement as the year went on. That will carry over into next year even more when we add some of the JUCO players we have recruited.

 

Also, if you wait a couple months, this will be discussed again.

 

define drastic?.....somewhat improved, drastic?......not even close. and shame on Bo for being a defensive minded coach and not recruiting big name defensive players.....that's on him.

It's apparent that you don't pay attention to recruiting and/or the games very closely.

 

[Stumpy1]

It has been hashed and rehashed on here dozens of times that the first few recruiting classes for Bo were not good especially on the defensive side of the ball. More specifically the D line.

 

That has improved drastically and those recruits came into this year extremely young with no experience. We saw drastic improvement as the year went on. That will carry over into next year even more when we add some of the JUCO players we have recruited.

 

Also, if you wait a couple months, this will be discussed again.

 

define drastic?.....somewhat improved, drastic?......not even close. and shame on Bo for being a defensive minded coach and not recruiting big name defensive players.....that's on him.

It's apparent that you don't pay attention to recruiting and/or the games very closely.

• it was painful to watch this defense get gashed by UCLA and lowly Minnesota.......among others.
  

 

I will agree with that but to say that Bo isn't recruiting big name defensive players is false. We offer numerous bigtime defensive players every year but none seem to be interested in coming here. Is that Bo's fault? Don't think so.

[It'sNotAFakeID]

I don't think it's much of a coincidence that the top teams have, for the most part, also recruited the top talent. But I think it's important to be aware of all the things that go into both recruiting rankings and then total defense.

 

I don't think it will shock anyone to hear that some recruits get an extra star whenever they commit to a big time school. For example, two recruits are given 3 stars by a recruiting service. One of them commits to Alabama--a team known for putting great defenders on the field; the other commits to Minnesota--a team not known for doing the same. The recruit who committed to Alabama is given 4 stars, while the recruit who committed to Minnesota remains at 3 stars. Why is the recruit who committed to Alabama given that extra star? Is he that much better? Or did he get that extra star because he committed to a school who "has an eye for talent"? There's nothing to conclusively say one way or the other.

 

Another thing to look at would be the disparity in the rankings of the different recruiting services. While most of the services follow a similar guideline to rank their recruits, some services place a higher emphasis on a certain aspect whereas others focus on a different aspect. So in the end you get a difference in team rankings due to some recruits being ranked higher on some services, and lower on other services. Is the disparity that great? More than likely not, but that depends on how you define significant disparity. Nebraska, for example, finds themselves ranked 38th on 247, 36th on Scout, and 33rd on Rivals. I'm excluding ESPN's rankings because they don't provide rankings beyond 40th, if I remember correctly. So the disparity for lowest to highest is 5 spots, which I suppose you could call significant. I'd be interested in seeing a composite ranking of all three services, and then see how that relates to total defense.

 

You remember why our 2009 and 2010 defenses were good? The players from our lowly defenses were on the team. It's because the players that were recruited to the program who were now juniors and seniors were the ones seeing the field. I hope I'm getting the point of this across: not all the players from a certain recruiting class see the field at the same time. This year, we had seniors, juniors, sophomores, and freshmen on the field; other years we don't have a single freshman or a single senior on the field. So you're not getting a real representation of the recruiting class to total defense picture. It's obscured by different classes being on the field at the same time.

 

And we haven't even gotten to the results on the field. Total defense doesn't take into consideration the caliber of the offenses that the team faces. So a defense that ranks in the top 30 could be ranked there because they played offenses who averaged a ranking of lower than 100th.

 

All of this makes it very difficult to truly represent, or even partly represent the relationship between recruiting rankings and total defense. All of those things (and potentially more) of those variables listed above are confounds.

 

Apologies if I'm wrong JTrain, but you took a look at scoring and total defense of each team in each respective year as well as the average recruiting ranks of teams in the past 6 years, right? If that's the case, then I think you may be misleading a bit. Why not take the average of the teams' scoring and total defense of the past six years? If you average one thing, doesn't it make sense to average the other thing?

 

Finally, I think that despite some statistical similarities, the defense we had on the field this year is vastly different than the defenses we fielded the past two seasons. The defenses in the past two seasons were unathletic and experienced. Our defense this year was for the most part athletic and inexperienced. Making up a deficit caused by inexperience is much easier to do than making up a deficit caused by unathleticism. Our defense is going to gain a little bit in athleticism from this year to next, but will gain tremendously in experience from this year to next. I think it's an exciting time for our defense, and for our team in general.

[JTrain]

I think you're mixing up two different topics. In my original post, the only reference to recruiting was in the fact that 2011 was the first year that the defense was composed primarily of Bo recruits. There was no statistical analysis of recruiting rankings or anything with that. Later in the thread we were discussing an old blog post from an anthropologist about the 2011 regular season performances compared to the recruiting rankings of previous years.

[BigRedBuster]

It has been hashed and rehashed on here dozens of times that the first few recruiting classes for Bo were not good especially on the defensive side of the ball. More specifically the D line.

 

That has improved drastically and those recruits came into this year extremely young with no experience. We saw drastic improvement as the year went on. That will carry over into next year even more when we add some of the JUCO players we have recruited.

 

Also, if you wait a couple months, this will be discussed again.

 

define drastic?.....somewhat improved, drastic?......not even close. and shame on Bo for being a defensive minded coach and not recruiting big name defensive players.....that's on him.

It's apparent that you don't pay attention to recruiting and/or the games very closely.

• it was painful to watch this defense get gashed by UCLA and lowly Minnesota.......among others.
  

 

Great. You now have half the equation. Now....watch the Georgia game.