Coach P Recruiting

Last year, shortly after Edsall left us for his dream job and subsequent dreamy 2-10 season (EdsaLOL) I wrote a fanpost summarizing Edsall's recruiting while at UConn. It included some nifty charts (in my humble opinion). Now that we have experienced Coach P's first recruiting class I decided to update those charts so that we might compare the two head coaches Connecticut has ever known as a I-A school.

After the jump you can see how important it was that we hire someone with strong ties to those talent filled Connecticut high schools. I've also collected the numbers for Edsall's first class at Maryland compared to the last few years of Maryland recruiting.

When I wrote the post last year it was before signing day and before we had gotten our new coach, so I left this past year's class out of the charts. As a result these "year later" charts actually include an additional two years of recruiting data. The "transition" class plus Coach P's first recruiting class.

Disclaimer: From the last post,

Most everything I have seen on this topic has been overall team rankings, which is a subjective analysis on top of subjective analyses of thousands of high school players. So I decided to strip away the subjective team analysis and only focus on the players because although it is subjective, a group of 3 star players is more likely to be better than a group of 2 star players. The best chance of consistent success is to have more players with higher ranking.

The charts below are based upon the ratings posted on Rivals.com for the years 2004-2010 (what was available). Rivals has the star ratings going back to 2002, so I posted those as well. On to the charts!

I'll go in the same order of charts as I did last time. First up is a simple plot of the number of 2 and 3 star recruits signed by UConn over the last 11 years.

Coach P maintains the number of 3 star recruits that Edsall had in his last season that were all his players. However, Paul bumped the number of two's to a solid 15.

Next up is the average Rival's rating for each of the recruiting classes. I like this way of looking at the recruiting class a bit better because the range of available ratings is larger.

Surprisingly, our highest average class was the one from the transition year. Pasqualoni has to be given some credit for at least retaining the talent that Edsall had recruited that year, which can be tough to do when a new coach comes in. This past year saw us regress back a little, but it was still every so slightly higher (5.41 vs 5.40) than Edsall's last class.

As I did last time, I charted out UConn compared to the Big East and unfortunately came to the conclusion that the upward trend seen in the chart above was more do to a shift in Rival's ranking of players than Edsall bringing in better talent.

Coach P continues the fine UConn tradition of being at the very bottom of the Big East in terms of average Rivals rating. Being close to those Connecticut high school coaches sure was a big help in this year's recruiting class.

Final Thought on UConn

Pasqualoni didn't bring about the better recruiting that we were expecting (or were told was going to happen) when he was hired, but at least he didn't regress. Since it's his first season, hopefully he is re-establishing himself in the world of recruiting and he will bring us an improved class next year and for the next few years until he retires. It's all we can hope for at this point.

The Maryland Addendum

I went table form for this one:

As anticipated, Edsall regressed, if only a bit. He got a few less Four star recruits than his predecessor. Plus there is that whole all of the talent leaving Maryland thing as well. EdsaLOL. So far I still feel pretty good about my prediction from last year

I hope you enjoy more 8-4, 7-5 seasons Maryland, because I feel pretty confident in saying that that is probably all you will get with Edsall.

EdsaLOL indeed.