Dr. Green and White Sports Authority

Happy return of college football! As you may have noticed, I have a lot of thoughts on college football, many of which are bolstered by my spreadsheet simulation / power rankings.  Time permitting, I decided that I will use this little corner of the internet to expand on those thoughts.  As for MSU, it has been a very long off season for the Spartans, and I think we are all ready to see them take the field this weekend.  I don’t know much about BGSU, but I think we can all agree that one of three things will happen:  1) MSU loses and the ESPN post about us being the most miserable fan base will actually come to pass.  2) MSU wins, but not very convincingly, and we will flash back to last year and start to wonder how rare the next win will be or 3) MSU wins big and we will simply write it off the BGSU is just a bad MAC team.  So, I recommend bringing an extra 6-pack to your tailgate, because you are pretty much going to need it.  For now, let’s take a quick spin around the country: Bi

How much do recruiting ranking really matter? A few weeks ago, I decided to investigate this debate in more detail.  I have started to assemble a database of players from all 14 Big Ten schools using each and every committed recruit back to 2007.  For the source of my data, I am using the Rivals database, as I have easy access to it and the format made the data easy import.  My goal was to try to categorize and quantify the overall success of each player in order to visualize and analyze the true value of the initial Rivals recruiting rating.  So far, I have inputted all the players in the MSU and UofM databases, and the result so far are quite interesting. For those that may not be familiar with the Rivals ranking/rating system, they use a 5-star system, but they also use a “rating” system that is broken down into smaller intervals (4.9 to 6.1, for whatever reason).  The table below shows how the star-ranking compares to the simple rating as well as give the number of players in each

Back in 2007, a certain someone said, “Michigan is a good school and I got a good education there, but the athletic department has ways to get borderline guys in and, when they’re in, they steer them to courses in sports communications. They’re adulated when they’re playing, but when they get out, the people who adulated them won’t hire them.”  That certain someone, of course, is current U. of Michigan head football coach, Jim Harbaugh.  A lot has clearly changed in 10 years, but I was wondering if anything has changed about UofM’s treatment of their “student athletes.”  A few years ago, when Brady Hoke was still in Ann Arbor, I pulled data from UofM’s media guide and other public sources and found a sad lack of diversity in the majors declared for the majority of the team (if they had declared any major at all).  Now that a new sheriff is in town, I decided that it would be a good time to see if anything has changed, using MSU’s roster as a comparison point. I have been working on a