Do BCS schools produce more NFL Talent?

Its been noted that a number of the impact players in the NFL came from schools that don't typically recruit top flight high school talent. Year after year, players from no-name schools (ie non-BCS) are taken in the first rounds of the NFL draft. Just looking at the 2009 draft we see the following names off the board in the first 2 rounds:

1 (16): Larry English, Northern Illinois

2 (47): Mike Mitchell, Ohio

2 (52): David Veikune, Hawaii

2 (57): Paul Kruger, Utah

2 (59): Martin Sherrod, Troy

2 (61): Sean Smith, Utah

That's 6 guys that the NFL scouts thought pretty highly of who were (presumably) missed by the 65 recruiting staffs at BCS schools. The question then becomes, what is the impact of the BCS players in the NFL vs. the "rest" of the college football world.

To do this analysis, lets start with some basic facts/assumptions:

1) There are 119 D-1A schools (I refused to learn what FBS and FCS are)

2) There are 65 BCS Schools.

3) ~55% of players play for BCS schools. This assumes that every school has filled up all of its scholarship spots. We'll ignore D-II and D-III for this to make the math more reaslistic.

4) We'll ignore the "Randy Moss" effect. There are some players too toxic for BCS programs that will have an NFL future. The BCS schools didn't miss these players, they just chose to ignore them to save the embarrassment of having them on the roster. My intuition tells me that this effect is becoming less and less prevalent as the pressure on coaches mounts (Google "The Fullmer Cup" for a fuller discussing on this topic)

So, based on this, if one were to randomly assign the "best" high school players to Div-1A schools, 55% would be drafted out of the BCS, 45% of the dregs of Div-1 (The MAC, MWC, Conf USA, Notre Dame, etc.)

To figure out if the BCS, with all of its advantages ($$$, TV exposure, etc.) is finding and developing players , lets grab a data source that lists nfl rosters by college. ESPN offers such a source (http://espn.go.com/nfl/players?search=). A couple of comments on the ESPN data:

1) its horribly inaccurate. A lot of players are missing from the data when listed by college, including Deuce McAllister, Le'Ron McClain, Michael Pittman, etc.

2) It includes far more players than are active on NFL rosters (~2200 players vs. 1700 active on 53 man rosters)

3) There are some weird elements to the data. Only 2 OG are listed and there are 5 dBs listed (I'd guess CB/S tweeneers). Kudos to Steve Hutchinson for being only one of 2 OG that ESPN considers worthy of listing.

4) we'll fix the errors in some subsequent analysis by cross referencing with NFL.com data

The first analysis is to simply count the players, by position and conference to see of the BCS schools are better at recruiting NFL talent than the rest of the country. This analysis is below:

Instantly a couple of observations can be made:

1) Overall, the BCS is a little better than the rest of the world. Instead of the 55% of NFL rosters one might expect from a random distribution, the BCS accounts for 62.5% of NFL rosters. This is actually pretty low considering their advantages in recruiting. In a subsequent post, I'll break down star rankings and (hopefully) show that the BCS is getting far more than 62.5% of the top flight high school recruits (at least as the folks at scouts and rivals rank them). You'd expect that there would be a huge disparity in talent. In fact, this analysis suggests that the BCS schools are just slightly better than average in judging (and developing) NFL talent.

2) Some positions clearly project better than others from High School to the NFL. Assuming the BCS is getting their choice of the "best" high school players, one can correlate high school ranking to NFL ability. The position with the best correlation appears to be DT and LB, where more than 70% of players are from BCS rosters. I'd postulate that these positions are mostly influenced by attributes that can be measured in high school (Size and strength).

3) Offensive skill positions are essentially the worst for the BCS schools. WR, QBs, and RBs are nearly statistically indeterminate. For all the energy devoted to landing top flight talent here, most BCS schools (the USCs and Florida notwithstanding) would be better off entering a player lottery than in signing the players they do (same talent at a fraction of the recruiting $). An NFL quality wide receiver is almost equally as likely to have come from a BCS school as not. QBs and RBs are not much better. Essentially the qualities that project an offensive skill player to the NFL are largely hard to distinguish at the High school level.

4) Punters are statistically more likely to come from non BCS schools. This is hard to justify. The data is a little skewed due to the small sample size, so it might be a mistake to read too much into it. There could be a "Zoltan Mesko effect" here. Perhaps the punters from weak schools get more game experience and are more likely to succeed in the NFL, but this may just be creating insights from statistical noise.

In the next few posts I'll dig into this data a little more, by looking at NFL stats to see if BCS players account for more production than non BCS players. Maybe they are a disproportionate amount of NFL yards and tackles?