Introduction
I have always been interested in college football, so I found it intriguing to analyze the 2023 college football recruiting rankings. I decided to use the rankings from 247 Sports, which is located on this page: https://247sports.com/Season/2023-Football/CompositeRecruitRankings/?InstitutionGroup=HighSchool
247 Sports is an American athletics website known for publishing content surrounding the recruitment and commitments of top high school athletes around the country. Using this data, my goal was to learn a little more about what goes into the creation of some of these recruiting lists.
What is the position with the highest number of players on the list?
Unlike other recruiting websites, 247 Sports chose to list their top 247 recruits, which reflects their unique name. I plan on showing the count of players by position by creating a bar graph with the count of each position.
This graph shows DL and WR share similar amounts of players on this list, both similarly above the rest. Positions ATH, IOL, QB, RB, and TE are in a tier of their own at the bottom of the count. I expected positions like QB and IOL to be low, but I was surprised how many DL their were.
How does position impact weight of athlete?
I want to visualize how the position played by an athlete affects their weight. I plan on doing this by creating a chart that visualizes the correlation between weight and position played.
From this graph, we can see positions DL, IOL, and OT share the highest ranges of weight. Both CB and WR have small ranges and are located towards the lighest on the graph.
How does position impact height of athlete?
I want to visualize how the position played by an athlete affects their height. I plan on doing this by creating a chart that visualizes the correlation between height and position played.
From this graph, we can see positions DL and OT share the highest ranges of height. RB seems to be the position with the shortest players.
How does position impact rank?
I wanted to see if the position a player played impacted how low or high they were ranked. I plan on doing this by creating a bar graph that shows the average rank for every position.
I was expecting a little more variance between the positions, but we can see that QB has the lowest average ranking, which means the player is more highly ranked. Positions like CB and IOL seemed to be ranked lower in comparison. I think positional value could explain this difference, 247 sports may view QB’s as more valuable than CB’s and rank the players based on that conclusion.
How does position impact rating?
After seeing the difference in ranking between the positions, I wanted to see how position impacted the rating of every player. I plan on showing this by creating a box plot showing the distribution between rating by position.
From this box plot, we can see that QB has the largest distribution in rating. We can also see that IOL has the smallest distribution. This data makes me believe that 247 Sports believes a IOL can never be as good as the best QB. This supports my hypothesis that they bring positional value into their rankings. The highest rating on this list is a quarterback, and the lowest is IOL. This information tells me that position does impact player rating.