The determinants of NCAA basketball recruiting outcomes

ABSTRACT

Using recruiting rankings from Rivals.com, the authors examine the determinants of recruiting success among D1 NCAA men’s basketball programmes. After controlling for a host of potentially relevant variables, the authors find that recruiting outcomes are correlated with recent on-court success, historical on-court success, stadium size and playing in a ‘power’ conference. Additionally, teams with a history of sending players to the NBA receive heightened recruiting outcomes. A team with a new coach can expect difficulties with recruiting, while head coaches with national championships receive a recruiting boost. Finally, the authors show that recruiting strategies for guards may differ from recruiting strategies for other players.

KEYWORDS:

• Basketball
• recruiting
• sports
• sports economics

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• Z2
• Z21
• Z22
• L83

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ The 2014 and 2015 champions, UConn and Duke, fielded rosters that contained seven and eight top 150 recruits, respectively.

² https://footballrecruiting.rivals.com/content.asp?SID=880&CID=1364602.

³ We suspected this could result from players avoiding older coaches. However, when coaching age was included in regressions, it was insignificant and the negative coefficient for COACHEXP remained.

⁴ For example, research institutions usually have more students; recruits may prefer to attend large institutions.