VT's 2005 Top Gun Recruiterby Will Stewart, TechSideline.com, 5/25/05 A couple of years ago, we ran an article titled "Naming VT's Top Gun Recruiter," a piece that reviewed the players signed by various VT assistant coaches from 1998-2003, then named Jim Cavanaugh as VT's "Top Gun" recruiter, beating out Bryan Stinespring and Charley Wiles. The award was an overall award, but I got to thinking, why not hand out the Top Gun award every year? And why not make it strictly numbers-based? For five years now, we have been producing TSL Pass articles "Inside the Numbers: Ranking the Recruits" (click here for the 2005 version) that use various ranking services (SuperPrep, Rivals.com, and Scout.com) to assign numerical scores for each incoming recruit. Recruits get a maximum of 15 points from each service and can score as high as 45 points total. It seems a natural extension of those rankings to total them up according to VT recruiting coach, assigning points to each coach for the recruits they signed, then see which coach gets the most points … and name him the Top Gun recruiter for that year. We have five years of "Ranking the Recruits" data, so not only can we name the Top Gun for 2005, but we can go back for five years and hand out the award. (As a sidebar, we have written articles ranking recruits in two ways: when they sign and after their VT careers are over. The first way is the "Ranking the Recruits" articles described above, where scores are assigned based on recruiting service rankings, before the recruit starts their VT career. The second way is with our "Ranking the Recruiting Classes" articles, which assign points to players based on what they accomplished during their VT careers. Less than a year from now, for the first time ever, we'll be able to compare pre-career "Ranking the Recruits" scores for a class to their post-career "Ranking the Recruiting Classes" scores, for the 2001 recruiting class. As soon as the 2006 NFL Draft is conducted, we'll have pre- and post-career numbers for the 2001 class, and that's when the fun starts of seeing which 2001 recruits met expectations, which ones were busts, and which ones were sleepers.) Before we hand out the Top Gun award for 2005 (and 2001-2004), which is a very simple exercise based on data we've got on file, let's rehash some good info that was in the 2003 Top Gun article that we ran. Here's a chart showing VT's assistant football coaches from 2001-2005 (the lack of turnover is amazing – Rickey Bustle left after 2002 and Kevin Rogers was hired to replace him, but that's it):
Now, let's crunch the numbers and see who comes out as Top Gun. We'll do a detailed analysis for 2005, including players signed and points scored, then we'll do a less-detailed analysis for 2001-2004, using just total points.
Here are the players signed by each coach in 2005, the number of points each player scored in our Ranking the 2005 Recruits article, and the total number of points scored by each coach.
There is no question that Jim Cavanaugh was the Top Gun this year, by a wide margin. Cavanaugh had a great year by any measurement and finished ahead of his fellow coaches in terms of total points and average points per player (with the exception of Tony Ball, who beat Cavanaugh in average points because Ball signed just one player, the highly-rated Ike Whitaker). So congratulations to Jim Cavanaugh, our 2005 Top Gun Recruiter. Now, what about 2001-2004?
In awarding Top Gun after the fact for 2001-2004, we'll list just the coaches and their scores, without going into detail on what players they signed and how those players scored. Here are the results in one table (with 2005 included, just for handy reference):
Here's a listing of just the winners, and the players they signed in their winning year.
This is interesting stuff. Cavanaugh is the king, but a surprise two-time winner is Lorenzo Ward, who doesn't sign the quantity of players that Cavanaugh and Stinespring do, but to use a baseball analogy, when he does make contact, he hits it out of the park, with recruits like Kevin Jones and Eddie Royal. In years where Stinespring has done very well, Ward has managed to eke out a win over him, leaving Stinespring, as good a recruiter as he is, with no wins. In the coming years, Stinespring and Cavanaugh will continue to duke it out, and Ward and others will get their shots in where they can. Data For all the scoring, all the tables in this article, and more, check out our Microsoft Excel spreadsheet: http://subscription.techsideline.com/tslpass/2005/topgundata2005.xls |
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