FanPost

Analyzing Talent on the 2-deep for offense vs. defense

There's been quite a bit of discussion on here lately about whether Northwestern's offensive struggles are due to a lack of talent or a lack of coaching. The challenge was issued to compare offensive and defensive recruits, so consider this challenge accepted.

Rather than look at recruiting rankings for all recruits over the last 4-5 years, I decided instead to focus on the current players on the field. So I used the 2-deep Northwestern published last week for the Stanford game and looked up the recruiting rankings for every player (for the 2-deep, so 2 of every position. If more than 2 were listed, I used the ones who seemed to play the most). I also looked at how many of the players had offers from other power 5 schools.

To be as consistent as possible, everything was from 24/7. I used their composite ratings and their offer lists. I'll also note I somewhat arbitrarily assigned TJ Green a rating of 75, because I didn't know what else to do as he had no rating and that was appreciably lower than anybody else on the list. Full data can be seen here.

The offense had a slightly higher average recruit ranking: 0.851 to 0.844. If you want to use median to avoid outliers (hello, Hunter Johnson!), the offense is 0.851 and the defense 0.845. For both units, 17 of the 22 players on the 2 deep had received offers from at least 1 more power 5 school.

You could argue the defense has more top-end talent, as 8 of the top 10 highest rated players were defenders (Johnson and Bowser being the offensive ones). But the defense also had 8 of the bottom 10 rated players, including four starters (Whillock, Bergin, Alex Miller, Trae Williams).

I think it's pretty obvious that the overall talent level for offense and defense isn't all that different. Both sides have the talent to be solid units. The difference comes in coaching. The defense has quality coaches and consistently outperforms their talent level (based on recruiting rankings). The offense does not have quality coaches (especially at OC/QB, WR, and OL, though to be fair the last one is new, so we'll see), and thus consistently underperforms their talent level (based on recruiting rankings).