Croom, Mullen, Recruiting, OM and Perception

[engie]

I keep hearing about Croom's mythical recruiting/evaluation prowess, and how Mullen has leached onto it, much like Nutt did with Orgeron. This attempts to downplay Mullen's player development, and I've found it to be quite the revisionist history. Let's look at the numbers.

Croom's rankings:
Scout, Rivals, Final Sagarin rank
2004 - 60, n/a, 114
2005 - 39, 34, 107
2006 - 39, 46, 78
2007 - 27, 39, 37
2008 - 33, 44, 93
Average: 39.6, 45.8, 85.8

Mullen's rankings:
2009 - 19, 25, 40
2010 - 38, 38, 15
2011 - 45, 44, 31
2012 - 17, 30, ytbs
Average of 29.75, 34.25, 28.6

Clearly, judging by rankings, Mullen has recruited better than Croom by a wide margin(about 9 spots better), and outcoached him by a much wider margin(about 57 spots better). Assuming a 3yr development period for recruits, IF Mullen's recruits eventually improve his teams by a margin identical to the amount that he's improved our recruiting, we're looking at a top 20 team, on AVERAGE....

OM's rankings:
Scout, Rivals, Final Sagarin Rankings
2004 - 39, 30, 82
2005 - 29, 30, 102
2006 - 15, 15, 74
2007 - 31, 27, 80
2008 - 38, 29, 10
2009 - 17, 18, 19
2010 - 15, 18, 84
2011 - 20, 19, 103
2012 - 63, 44, ytbs
Average - 29.67, 25.56, 69.25

In this period of time, Ole Miss leads State 5-1-2 in Recruiting. State leads OM 5-3 on the field.

 

[whereisomaha.sixpack]

Mullen is a better coach than Nutt. I need to sit down after that shocker

 

[engie]

can be drawn from that data. Is that all you got from it?

From my perspective, it doesn't in any way show that Croom as a better coach than Orgeron, in that their final Sagarin rankings averaged out as basically identical...