The Commitment Project

[Harry]

The Commitment Project: studying recruits, college football edition

Football players can be recruited from the day they set foot in high school until they sign beginning the first Wednesday in February of their senior year. Between those two moments, they have the option to pledge their undying devotion to as many suitors as they wish. At the same time, football coaches juggle a finite number of scholarships and, typically, offer more scholarships than they have to give.

So recruits seek the best situation as coaches seek the best class. When those goals align, a commitment happens. When a better deal or a better player comes along, sometimes a decommitment happens.

So exactly how often do players break commitments? Inspired by SI.com college basketball writer Luke Winn's Commitment Project, I decided to chart how often the top 100 recruits (using the Rivals.com rankings) in the past five years publicly broke their commitments. I also charted where those players eventually signed and what happened to them after they signed. The numbers were fascinating. (Unlike Winn's project, I did not track how many high schools each recruit attended. This probably will eventually become an issue in football, but at the moment high school-swapping isn't nearly as rampant as it is in basketball.)

Of the 500 players ranked in the Rivals100 for the classes of 2007 through 2011, 73 (14.6 percent) decomitted at some point during their recruitment. Of those, 62 (12.4 percent) ultimately signed with a school other than the one to which they originally committed.

Read more: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2012/writers/andy_staples/01/20/commitment.project/index.html#ixzz1kDQKPmhD

Read more: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2012/writers/andy_staples/01/20/commitment.project/index.html#ixzz1kDQ5skGP