CFB in the NFL

 Choosing the right university is one of the biggest decisions that someone can make in their early life. There are multiple different factors that play a role in shaping the future for the individual and open up a series of doors, this is magnified for students looking to play college sports, specifically college football. When deciding on a college football program to go to, a lot of students sway their decisions one way or another based on amenities such as fancy locker rooms and the best weight rooms. The flashy additions are something that a lot of student athletes take into consideration but these aren’t always the best choices for collegiate athletes. The first step in the process of deciding which college program to commit to is to decide what is important to you, this could be academics, going to the National Football League, tuition, class size, if they have your major, ect… For this analysis I wanted to see what college football team is the best program for someone to go to if they wanted to expand their career into the National Football League. By analyzing the National Football League Statistics dataset which I found on Kaggle I was able to find a few common trends in the National Football League.

The first step and challenge that I found in my analysis was to go through and find what I wanted the data to tell me, the National Football League Statistics datasets that were presented on Kaggle had 19 individual datasets and each of those had 26 columns and over 4000 rows making it incredibly hard for the data to tell a specific story. From this I decided that the most exciting data would be the basic National Football League statistics which included categories such as age, college, experience, height, position, and weight. Since this data is useless though without joining it with any other data set, I went through and joined the data from the basic National Football League statistics with quarterback statistics as well as running back, wide receiver, and tight end statistics. From combining these datasets I was able to get a grasp on what colleges were producing the most National Football League drafts and what positions they were. I was also able to derive what college program had the most touchdowns in the National Football League.

The first analysis that I wanted to find out was which college was sending the most recruits to the National Football League. To do this I ran a value_counts function to find out which college had the most recruits and plot this on Tableau using the data gathered from the python notebook I had created.

From this we can see that Notre Dame has the most recruits in the National Football League with 305 recruits in the league from the basic statistics dataset. The next two colleges to follow were the University of Southern California with 289 National Football League recruits and the Ohio State with 266 recruits. This is surprising because according to an article on bleacher report written by Tyler Brooke, Ranking Top 25 Recruiting Classes in 2019 After High School All-American Games, stated in 2019 the University program with the most high school recruits was The Alabama Crimson Tide in first place with 28 recruits, including three 5-star recruits. They were shortly followed by The Georgia Bulldogs with 23 recruits, including five 5-star recruits, and The Oklahoma Sooners with 23 recruits. So why were more high school students going to schools like Alabama instead of Notre Dame? Was it because of the head coach’s recruiting skills? Was it because they are some of the biggest names in football now? From my analysis I would not be able to answer these questions, but I can assume that even though schools like Alabama, Oklahoma, and Georgia aren’t in the top 3 producers of National League Football recruits they are in the top 20 with incredibly high numbers of recruits making it in to the league. In recent years Alabama have won 5 out of the last 10 National Collegiate Athletic Association National Championships, so from this we can gather that it becomes a status symbol for students going to the school trying to be on a national championship team.

The next question that I wanted to answer was what positions are the most recruited in the National Football League. For this I took all of the datasets that were provided on the National Football League statistics page on Kaggle and ran a inner join allowing me to see what position had the most recruits.

As you can see positions such as wide receivers and defensive ends are the most sought over positions in the league. This is most likely because in the National Football League some of the most prized players are wide receivers and defensive ends, this is because they can make or break a team. An example of this is in 2011 A.J. Green and Julio Jones were both drafted in the first 10 drafts of that year, each player making an almost immediate team gaining an average of 1000 yards a season. By drafting wide receivers teams are setting themselves up for success, again in the 2014 draft there was another big wide receiver core that after drafted their respective teams were more successful than before. This should be something to consider as well when applying to colleges for high school recruits, when switching to a new college team high school recruits should consider possibly switching positions if the option is available to allow them a higher chance of getting drafted. High school recruits should understand that if they want to succeed in the National Football League that they either have to be the best of the best at a position like quarterback or kicker, or play a position like wide receiver or defensive end where there is more open positions on teams.

I hope this analysis provides some sort of clarification for high school students looking to play college football in the National Collegiate Athletic Association division 1. If students consider what they want out of a college football experience, whether that is a good education, chances of getting into the National Football league, or even location, they should always consider the facts, and do their due diligence to decide the right school.