College Football Returning Starters Part II: A Deeper Look

In Part I, we looked at whether or not the total number of returning starters to college football teams had any predictive power on next year’s success.

After further review, we came to the conclusion that the returning starters statistic had many flaws.

Essentially, “returning starters” attempts to quantify how much experience a team has coming back the next year. The problem with returning starters is that it doesn’t tell you the depth of experience. It simply gives you a generic yes or no answer.

A key point to remember when looking at returning starters is the fact that not all returning starters are created equal.

Why? As mentioned before, returning a 4 year starting quarterback isn’t the same as returning a freshman linebacker last year who was forced into duty. They each count as 1 returning starter, yet each impact the game much differently.

EXPERIENCE- FOR REAL THIS TIME

Ideally, we would look at each player’s contribution to the team and see what percentage of production is coming back the next year. Fortunately, college football guru Phil Steele has done the dirty work for us.

Mr. Steele has developed what he calls experience charts in order to try and summarize how much experience a team has coming back. This should give the standard “returning starters” statistic some depth and more accurately represent the true amount of experience a team has coming back.

His charts use many different statistics that represent experience returning on a team: senior starters returning, seniors on the two deep, percentage of lettermen returning, percentage of returning offensive yardage, percentage of tackles returning (defense), and total offensive line career starts.

He takes all of these numbers, weights them, and produces an aggregate “experience score” that ranges from 0-100 with 100 being the most experienced.

We would expect a strong relationship between experience and team success now that we are using a more complete definition of experience.

Now that we have this new and improved experience data, we again ask the question: do teams with more experience returning result in better teams?

ANALYSIS

Similar to Part I, I took the ELO ratings for each team and compared them to their experience scores. The chart is below:

Much like Part I, there seems to be very little relationship between experience score and ELO rating.

Before I saw what the plot looked like, I was expecting there to be a little more predictive power for the experience score. Unfortunately, it appears that experience is highly overrated by us college football fans.

As much as we want to believe that teams with more experience improve year over year, the numbers simply don’t support this notion.

POSSIBLE EXPLANATIONS

Experience may show up in smaller parts of the game. The quarterback taking a timeout when the play clock is running out, throwing away the football instead of taking a sack, running out of bounds when you need to conserve time, and many other small details may become better with experience.

Technically these “intangibles” should make your team better, but it looks like these veteran moves don’t make a very big impact.

What us fans expect to improve with experience is confidence and familiarity. Player’s skills like reading coverages, knowledge 0f the system, coach familiarity, better fundamentals, play recognition, etc. should get better the more someone plays. If it doesn’t, the lack of player development could be a result of the quality of coaching.

Al Davis is famous for the saying, “Just win, baby!” He didn’t say, “Just play, baby!” In the end, experience doesn’t seem to have a positive effect on the win column.

What do you think about experience? Is it still worth considering? Let me know in the comments.