2009 Decommitment Data

[Redhawk]

Decommitment Craze
(Free)

Decommitments occur for many reasons and they also come more frequently than ever before. There was a time when a recruit changing his mind and signing with a different school than the one he originally committed to was regarded more as a bad break, or just an unlikely turn of events that couldn?t be avoided. The decommitment was usually unexpected, certainly not considered mainstream. Now, no decommitment is worth reporting without information about how ?firm? it is.

SuperPrep magazine printed the names of 35 prospects who changed their minds in 1994 and by 2000, that number had risen to 56. The names of 99 switchers showed up in ?07 and a whopping 146 youngsters exploded into the public?s eye as decommitters for the class of 2008. Switching hats at a family-filled conference table has never been more apropos.

This trend shows no signs of slowing down. Oral commitments are regarded as little more than temporary reservations by a growing number of prospects, often putting college coaches into a bind. Sometimes, it?s those college coaches who initiate the changes themselves by cooling on kids they would like to replace with a different prospect.

Increasingly however, the no-holds-barred nature of the football recruiting environment can create a real dilemma for committed recruits. ?All?s fair in love and recruiting? has become the order of the day and committed recruits frequently find themselves deluged with information and heavy pressure from other schools wanting to change their minds. In fact, some schools encourage prospects to keep commitments to themselves, or silent, so as not to become targets for other schools. Knowing your enemy can only help.

The persuasive power-point attempts on the part of powerful, charismatic coaches can be tempting for even the most solidly committed youngsters. And coaching changes, new offers and academic realities always provide logical foundation for a decommit.

Then again, other prospects don?t appear to need all that much mind-bending to change course. They are like decommitments waiting to happen. Just show ?em a little love and a lean depth chart.

The recent trend towards earlier oral commitments (Texas already has 10 class of 2010 commits) also feeds right into the decommitment craze. Larger numbers of prospects are committing so early now that they can?t possibly know enough about other programs to feel assured that they won?t change their minds. And many originally commit with the intention of officially visiting other schools. These so-called ?soft commits? have expanded the meaning of ?commitment? such that its definition couldn?t be more cloudy, some would say meaningless, nowadays.

Holding onto your commits can be much more difficult than getting those non-binding promises in the first place. It can be the decommits that never happen, or never actually result in a new signing destination, that figure to increasingly shape signing classes and the public?s perception of who is successful.

Illinois wide receiver Terry Hawthorne stuck with the Fighting Illini over Missouri and Oklahoma. Florida defensive tackle Gary Brown did not defect to Florida State. Defensive back Byron Moore decommitted first from UCLA, then from USC and was rumored to be signing with Notre Dame, but unexpectedly signed with USC instead.

Here?s a look at various 2009 decommits.

I also did a little bit of my own research. I wasn't going to post this due my uncertainties about the accuracy of the data, but when I saw the above article I decided to. At least it's a discussion point.

On signing day I went through the ESPN decommitment database from their most highly ranked players down to about "60" or so. I collected their position (according to ESPN), the schools to which they initially committed as well as the school that they chose in the end. I then did some basic analysis of the data. It should be noted that this is far from perfect. I don't know how accurate the info was in the database nor how up to date. There are certain examples that we as Buckeye fans would understand. McDougald, for example, is listed as a decommit from OSU to Kansas. Also, analyzing in this way doesn't account for players that might have decommitted multiple times. As a possible mistake on my part, I didn't include players that committed to "school A", decommitted and then re-committed to that same school. Finally, at the time I collected the data, there were still several players that were undecided on their final school, most notably Bryce Brown. I collected 194 players, which appears to be many more than reported in the above article.

I have also attached the excel spreadsheet that I made if anyone wants to look at it for any reason. I had to change the file extension to .txt in order to upload it.

Here are the decommitments by postion:
DL 31
OL 26
WR 23
ATH 21
QB 21
S 19
LB 17
CB 13
RB 12
TE 10
K 1

Here are the schools most commonly spurned (minimum 4):
Auburn 11
Tennessee 10
Clemson 7
Michigan 7
Rutgers 7
Tulsa 7
Iowa St 5
Miss St 5
Oklahoma 5
Florida 4
Hawaii 4
LSU 4

Here are the schools who were able to gain the most commitments (minimum 4):
Undecided 11
Mississippi 10
South Carolina 9
Oklahoma St 6
Penn St 6
Baylor 5
Texas Tech 5
UCLA 5
Auburn 4
Duke 4
Florida St 4
Houston 4
Miami 4
Tennessee 4

[Scoopfan]

Michigan actually had 9 decommitments, for the record.

[Oneshot]

It's slightly off data, since the top three schools (and kinda the fourth) had major coaching changes, which would definitely explain the number of decommits.

But judging from the heck raised around this board, you'd think OSU was #1