[Papa John]

- I am not quite sure how one would use this to set expectations overall. Presumably, if you think the team should be better, you would also think the recruiting should be better.
- The not very well rated 2008 class included: Andrew Luck, Chris Owusu, Jonathan Martin, Chase Thomas, Delano Howell, David DeCastro, Michael Thomas, Warren Reuland, Sam Schwartzenstein, Johnson Bademosi. Possibly the most important class in the emergence of Stanford football as a national power (for that matter, probably true solely for Andrew Luck).

Great point, and I had the same issues in looking at the data. I thought that the pre-Harbaugh recruiting classes must have been amongst the worst in the power 5 because none of those teams had .500 records. But that's not the case. The most extreme example: the 2006 team was 1-10, yet the 2002-2005 recruiting classes--I never assume too much contribution from true freshmen--were ranked 26th, 41st, 35th and 29th. That's middle of the road for a power 5 school, so 1-10 can't be explained by poor recruiting. On the other hand, Harbaugh's Orange Bowl team (2010) season was powered by the recruiting classes from 2006-2009. Those classes were ranked 56th, 49th, 48th and 20th. And that team was 12-1! And remember that my rankings are based on average stars per commit, so quantity is not an issue.

So I didn't try to set performance expectations based on recruiting from the past 20 years. I just used the data from the Shaw era to try to generate reasonable expectations for Shaw's teams in terms of recruiting and wins-losses, without stating that the correlation between the two is terribly high. I think that 10 years should be enough data for such an analysis, but maybe my method is too crude.

One thing I didn't mention before but was on my mind: these expectations based on median data are probably the highest for any Stanford coach since WW II.

[Papa John]

- I am not quite sure how one would use this to set expectations overall. Presumably, if you think the team should be better, you would also think the recruiting should be better.
- The not very well rated 2008 class included: Andrew Luck, Chris Owusu, Jonathan Martin, Chase Thomas, Delano Howell, David DeCastro, Michael Thomas, Warren Reuland, Sam Schwartzenstein, Johnson Bademosi. Possibly the most important class in the emergence of Stanford football as a national power (for that matter, probably true solely for Andrew Luck).

Great point, and I had the same issues in looking at the data. I thought that the pre-Harbaugh recruiting classes must have been amongst the worst in the power 5 because none of those teams had .500 records. But that's not the case. The most extreme example: the 2006 team was 1-10, yet the 2002-2005 recruiting classes--I never assume too much contribution from true freshmen--were ranked 26th, 41st, 35th and 29th. That's middle of the road for a power 5 school, so 1-10 can't be explained by poor recruiting. On the other hand, Harbaugh's Orange Bowl team (2010) season was powered by the recruiting classes from 2006-2009. Those classes were ranked 56th, 49th, 48th and 20th. And that team was 12-1! And remember that my rankings are based on average stars per commit, so quantity is not an issue.

So I didn't try to set performance expectations based on recruiting from the past 20 years. I just used the data from the Shaw era to try to generate reasonable expectations for Shaw's teams in terms of recruiting and wins-losses, without stating that the correlation between the two is terribly high. I think that 10 years should be enough data for such an analysis, but maybe my method is too crude.

One thing I didn't mention before but was on my mind: these expectations based on median data are probably the highest for any Stanford coach since WW II.