2008 Recruiting Retrospective

Season #2 has arrived. Some of you may call it the offseason, but that implies it's without excitement. For college basketball devotees like us, the coaching carousel, AAU and recruiting season, and the speculation about who's staying and who's going to the NBA hold almost as much intrigue as the season itself does. One other thing that happens during the second season is player movement via transfers. This seems to happen more and more now for a few reasons, both speculative and factual.

One driver would seem to be the player movement at the high school level. For a top level recruit, it seems unusual if the player hasn't been to more than one high school. Whether it's a guy transferring from his local public school to a local private school power, or it's the wandering nomad of high school hoops whose number of school matches or exceeds the 4 years of high school, players move around.

The second factor which we've seen more and more every year, is the graduate student loophole which allows a "student-athlete" who has graduated from his current institution with eligibility remaining to transfer to play immediately at another school, provided he does so to enroll in a graduate program not offered at his current school. That seems quite logical, but if you've followed this over the past couple of seasons, it's usually a way for bigger schools to poach a player from a school lower down the rungs.

Jeff Goodman on CBSSports puts together an annual transfer list these days which is incredibly comprehensive. His list already has over 200 names on it and will almost assuredly continue growing as the academic year comes to a close and the coaching carousel continues to spin.

All of this led me to take a look at the high school class of 2008 and ask the question: how many players are four year players? For those that don't finish those four years is it a transfer situation, a draft situation, or something else entirely? This would probably be even more interesting if I were able and willing to track which school(s) these players originally committed to and when, but that's a bit more work than necessary for now.

So let's take a look. I used the top 30 players at each position on Rivals' rankings (top 20 for Centers) and tracked how their college careers have gone. Here's the positional breakdown:

PG - 9 early entries, 4 transfers, 16 four-year players, 1 other

SG - 10 early entries, 10 transfers, 11 four-year players

SF - 5 early entries, 7 transfers, 16 four-year players, 2 other

PF - 10 early entries, 8 transfers, 9 four year players, 3 medical issues

C - 3 early entries, 8 transfers, 9 four year players

So in total, out of the 140 players in the class of 2008 we had the following breakdown:

37 early entries

37 transfers

60 four-year players

6 other

Early entries are anyone playing professional basketball right now whether it's a traditional 1 and done, a guy playing in Europe, or someone like Brandon Jennings who never made it to college, choosing to go to Italy instead. The other category has some guys who had to stop playing due to injury and a few guys who switched sports.

In the ACC the numbers were a little different:

9 early entries

9 transfers

18 four-year players

1 other

The league actually had an identical even split between transfers and early entries just like the first sample, but the number of four year players was half of the total pool as compared to the above where it was a bit lower (3/7).

Moral of the story: expect player movement. When a guy gets his jersey handed to him on Senior Night after playing for your favorite school for four years, he's the exception, not the rule.