Articles on Difficulty of O-Line Recruiting and Multi-Sport Recruits

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What began with old media guides and a little curiosity has become an emerging business that is trying to make college football recruiting smarter. The spreadsheet that Branstad started has evolved into a database of nearly 60,000 current and former football players. His company, Tracking Football, is attempting to introduce analytics to the recruiting process using verified track data and that historical context to help identify the most athletically gifted recruits.

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Tracking Football became an NCAA-approved scouting service three years ago and has since partnered with more than 20 FBS programs. Seven of their clients — Clemson, Texas A&M, Texas, Oregon, Michigan, Florida State and Washington — have top-15 ranked recruiting classes for 2019, according to the 247Sports Composite. The company is capitalizing on a booming time for college football support staff growth while trying to convince set-in-their-ways coaches to let data play a role in the talent identification and evaluation process.

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He went deeper. Branstad connected with Frank Bogaert, a consultant and mathematician from Belgium who helped him establish the statistical correlation between track and field success and football success. He teamed with Aaron Hunter, a longtime friend and former Indiana University football player who became his co-founder, to start adding entire teams and recruiting classes to their data set. And the three worked together to develop an efficient system for synthesizing all of that data. What they invented was their Player Athletic Index, or PAI, a proprietary metric that uses all of that historical data to establish a rating system for Division I football athleticism customized for every position group. Players are scored on a scale of 0.0 to 5.0 based on their track and field performances, position, height, weight and how those combined traits compare historically. By using their backlog of NFL and college data to establish these models, they’re providing college coaches with a resource that can help identify, verify and compare current high school prospects.

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The rating system compares football players against the Division I standard at their position. A player with a 3.0 PAI score is considered above average. Even a 2.5 is a solid score. Anything above 4.0 is considered outstanding, and less than 2 percent of the nearly 60,000 players they’ve studied have earned a perfect 5.0 score. The king of all 5.0 PAI athletes? Bo Jackson. Baseball, sprints, hurdles, shot put, discus, high jump, long jump, triple jump, pole vault, decathlon — Bo did it all as a high schooler in 1982 and did it at an impossibly elite level. If you’re creating an athletic score and Jackson isn’t on top, Branstad said, you’re doing something wrong. Over the past five years, the average PAI score of NFL first-round draft picks is 4.0, and the average for all draft picks is 3.6. The average Power 5 football signee had a PAI score of 3.2. The average Group of 5 signee had a 2.7 score, and the FCS average is roughly 2.3. The system yielding those results is actually impressive when you consider no football-specific metrics are factored in.

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The track and field data that Branstad and his buddies have been collecting for more than a decade are especially useful for a few important reasons. For one, track times and field events are universal. The 100-meter dash is run the same way in every state, and it’s run the same way every year. And because that’s always been the case, these results hold up over time, from generation to generation. A football recruit’s proficiency in basketball, baseball or wrestling isn’t quite as easy to quantify. There’s too much variance in their roles and in the quality of competition from team to team and state to state. With track, it’s straightforward. And for college recruiters, there’s a more implicit aspect in play here: They prefer multi-sport athletes who are competitive in more than just football. In Tracking Football’s study of the class of 2019, 73 percent of recruits who hold offers have participated in multiple sports, and 56 percent have competed in track and field. “We would really struggle to ever sign a kid who’s not a multi-sport kid,” a Power 5 recruiting coordinator told The Athletic, speaking on the condition of anonymity for competitive reasons. “If you’re a really good athlete, you should want to be a really good athlete. Now, there’s some in every class, but typically that’s not what we want.”

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They’ve understandably made it their mission, too, to continue pushing back against the trend of specialization. Kyler Murray is clearly a rare two-sport phenom who possesses terrific speed. But he admitted recently he never wanted to run track. Fellow Heisman finalists Tua Tagovailoa and Dwayne Haskins have 0.0 PAI scores because they also skipped track and field. Tracking Football continues to publish studies on topics such as how many NFL draft picks played multiple sports in high school (88 percent this year) or how many high school All-Americans have track backgrounds (63 percent). They recognize, when it comes to advocating for the value of multi-sport participation and its correlation to football, they still have a lot of people to convince.

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This week when your favorite team announces its signing class, or when you hear about the four- or five-star recruit that your school did or did not get, remember this number: 2.4. 
That is the average star ranking of the 15 offensive linemen voted to the Pro Bowl last year who were evaluated in the era of the recruiting star system. None of them were ranked as five-star prospects; four were four-star guys — the same number as there were zero-star players. Joe Thomas, the best offensive tackle of his era, went to 10 Pro Bowls in his 11 seasons. Thomas once was ranked as the nation’s No. 18 offensive tackle prospect. From the 2015 signing class, prospects who are seniors now, Clemson’s Mitch Hyatt is the only four- or five-star O-line recruit (according to 247Sports) to make first-team all-conference.

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