The Effectiveness of College Football Recruiting Ratings in Predicting Team Success: A Longitudinal Study

Abstract

American college football is a multibillion-dollar industry for the 130 schools that play at the highest level. College football is unique in that it must recruit student athletes, unlike high school or pro football. An entire multimillion-dollar industry has developed to provide recruiting ratings and team-specific information for rabid fans. The question in this study is “Do recruiting rankings matter?” This study uses the 247Sports class ratings and team ratings to predict the future success of teams. The Sagarin final ratings are used as a proxy for team success. The results indicate that knowing recruiting rankings explains up to 36% of the variability of the Sagarin ratings.

Keywords: college football, college athletics, recruiting ratings, NCAA, Sagarin, student athlete

JEL Classification: Z20, Z23, I23