Luv Ya Blue

Thanks to ARH for the link.

So it isn’t exactly what I was looking for, since I was hoping to prove that the home state of football players being Texas does not make them any better than players from other states.  This study instead looks at what university the kid came from.  However, knowing that the best talent in Texas tends to go to UT and OU and, to a lesser extent, A&M, we can look at those schools as a proxy.

And what do we learn?

Oklahoma and Texas, which played for or won a BCS national championship six times in the past 10 seasons, didn’t finish in the top 25 of the survey results.
So looking at those two schools, I think my speculation that Texas high school talent is nothing special just might be spot-on.

What about A&M?

Big 12 rivals Nebraska, Oklahoma State and Texas A&M finished higher.

Hmm.  Not sure how much higher, but it can’t be too high because he names the schools that did the best (they’ll reveal the exact rankings later.)  So, I am going to guess that A&M didn’t fare very impressively and then say that further corroborates my point.  We’ll see.

Snicker.

(if the deadspin videos don’t work, just go to YouTube and there are plenty to choose from)

Most of the people who read this blog know me personally. And most of those people know that my poker playing has been curtailed a lot the past couple of years because I quit my decent paying energy trading job to found a startup company. As a result, I don’t have much fun money aside from what my wife provides as she supports our family, and my gambling (at any stakes) isn’t something that she likes – and shouldn’t be expected – to subsidize. So I don’t play much poker aside from $10 kitchen table games with guys from church every few weeks.

That said, my new company continues to grow, we’ve got enough funding now to continue with our startup phase and actually hire people, and we’re about to start actually making money.

So what?

Well, my company is in the business of making synthetic natural gas: SNG. And SNG also stands for something else, as many people here very well know. Very rarely does Google deliver me daily news alerts that contain news about the MY kind of SNG, but I regularly get inundated with news about the other type of SNG.

And I’m almost to the point where I can start paying attention to that again. Which is nice.

Is it a coincidence that Fro is moving back just as this is happening? Maybe not, but I’m sure he could use the money.

This is a good read.  I’ve been wanting to do similar research for a while, but finding historical recruiting rankings isn’t easy.  Basically, the guy took recruiting rankings for the past 8 years and compared them to final AP rankings over (almost) the same period of time.  It proves a few things related to UT that I have been saying for some time:

-  Contrary to our schtick, we actually finish better, on average, in the final AP than our recruiting rankings would predict.  In other words, we do more with less, not the other way around.

 -  The fanbase that most loves to say we do less with more, the Aggies, is one of the two worst teams as far as underachieving relative to its recruiting rankings.

-  I often hear that Texas gets its pick of the litter and outrecruits everybody.  I suppose this is based on selectively remembering 1999 and 2002 and forgetting all other years.  In 4 of the past 7 years, UT’s class has been ranked 10 or worse.  This bothers me tremendously, and I think we can and should do better.  In order to do better, we need to try harder with the out-of-state recruits, a strategy Mack Brown has eschewed for almost all of his time on the 40 acres (there are a couple notable exceptions).  I think our misguided strategy is based on the misconception that Texas HS football talent is the best on the planet.  Texas high schools may have better coaching that makes better players on Day 1, but after 4 or 5 years, kids from Idaho and Maine do just as well as those from Texas.  And that will be the subject of some research I am going to do – comparing the state of origin of NFL draftees.  This will take a while, but I am going to be shocked if it reveals that Texas HS football players are any different from anybody else after benefiting from college coaching.