soupy17
- MI
Yesterday I posted in the "Looking back thread" that I decided I would dive into getting data on the "talent ranking" of each B1G team over the course of the season, and also seeing how that relates to finishing position in the conference.
In case you don't want to read that post, what I've done is determined a talent rating for each team for the last 10 seasons played + the upcoming season by taking the average of the 247 Composite rating of each scholarship player on the roster. If a player is on roster and did not receive a rating, they received a rating of 0.7, equal to the lowest rating I've seen on 247. For simplicity's sake, I've also included every player listed on the roster for that season, even if they were red-shirting as a transfer (think Rayvonte Rice 2012-13) or injured for the season (think Tracy Abrams 2014-15 & 2015-16). While I know it's not necessarily perfect, it was the best way for me to quickly put this together without researching every Big Ten team in depth for the last 10 seasons.
Now for some results!
This first graph attempts to answer Second and Chalmers' original question which inspired this research: "If order of finish in the Big Ten were determined strictly by recruiting rankings". I tried to color each team by roughly their team color, but that becomes an issue with all the red in this conference.
One of the most interesting things to me looking at this is how the conference goes from having some defined "tiers" in recurring talent level in the earlier years shown, to having more teams jump up and down the rankings in more recent seasons. Also notable is that Illinois is currently at our lowest rank in talent relative to the rest of the conference in the last 10 years, but that is still 7th in the conference.
Next graph shows the relative talent level of each team, rather than the ranking. This one does an even better job of highlighting the talent parity in the conference over the last few years.
Final graph shows Illinois' rank in the Big 10 in talent level vs. our actual finishing position in the conference standings. I used overall record as a tie-breaker for conference records. I don't think I need to point out the picture that this graph tells about our on-court performance over the last 10 years.
I can do these for each team in the B1G upon request. I didn't want to post all 14 right off the bat. If anyone has any questions that they think could be answered by this data let me know! Or if you have any ideas of how to better display this information I'm open to that as well!
In case you don't want to read that post, what I've done is determined a talent rating for each team for the last 10 seasons played + the upcoming season by taking the average of the 247 Composite rating of each scholarship player on the roster. If a player is on roster and did not receive a rating, they received a rating of 0.7, equal to the lowest rating I've seen on 247. For simplicity's sake, I've also included every player listed on the roster for that season, even if they were red-shirting as a transfer (think Rayvonte Rice 2012-13) or injured for the season (think Tracy Abrams 2014-15 & 2015-16). While I know it's not necessarily perfect, it was the best way for me to quickly put this together without researching every Big Ten team in depth for the last 10 seasons.
Now for some results!
This first graph attempts to answer Second and Chalmers' original question which inspired this research: "If order of finish in the Big Ten were determined strictly by recruiting rankings". I tried to color each team by roughly their team color, but that becomes an issue with all the red in this conference.
One of the most interesting things to me looking at this is how the conference goes from having some defined "tiers" in recurring talent level in the earlier years shown, to having more teams jump up and down the rankings in more recent seasons. Also notable is that Illinois is currently at our lowest rank in talent relative to the rest of the conference in the last 10 years, but that is still 7th in the conference.
Next graph shows the relative talent level of each team, rather than the ranking. This one does an even better job of highlighting the talent parity in the conference over the last few years.
Final graph shows Illinois' rank in the Big 10 in talent level vs. our actual finishing position in the conference standings. I used overall record as a tie-breaker for conference records. I don't think I need to point out the picture that this graph tells about our on-court performance over the last 10 years.
I can do these for each team in the B1G upon request. I didn't want to post all 14 right off the bat. If anyone has any questions that they think could be answered by this data let me know! Or if you have any ideas of how to better display this information I'm open to that as well!
