Pipeline Rankings v2.0- College Football 25
Hello everyone! Coach Croot here with an update to the Pipeline Rankings post/novel I wrote a little over a week ago. I received a lot of comments pointing out some very significant points around my rankings that I was failing to capture. I want to highlight two in particular.
1. A Tier 4 or 5 pipeline seems to improve influence a lot more than Tier 1-3 pipelines. Without having access to the backend to track influence gains in the recruit database, this is more of a gut feeling than hard evidence, but I agree with everyone that mentioned teams with T4 and T5 pipelines seem to dominate recruits in those pipelines when they want to. Shoutout to u/onlineuserX for pointing this out, and giving me the idea to modify how I weight each tier!
2. My rankings did not account for the number of teams that have each pipeline. This is a big one. While pipelines such as Central Florida have tons and tons of strong recruits, it turns out that nearly 60% of teams contain the Central Florida pipeline. Combine that with the fact that there are 6 teams with a T5 and 2 teams with a T4 Central Florida pipeline, a team with a T1 is simply going to be outmatched if any solid team becomes interested in their recruit. Shoutout to everyone who pointed this out, but particularly to u/Culprit89 who was one of the first to do so!
So how do we fix these issues? I decided upon two modifications to the formula I have been using to rank the pipelines.
The first modification was to boost up the number of "points" awarded for a T4 and T5 pipeline. In the original rankings, I simply awarded points equal to the tier of a pipeline and then multiplied it by the base pipeline strength; T5s were awarded 5 points, T4s were awarded 4 points, and so on. In the new rankings, I use a modified Fibonacci sequence to award points: T1-3 are still awarded points equal to their tier, but T4 is now awarded 5 points and T5 is awarded 8 points. This means that T5s and T4s are weighted even stronger than before.
The second modification I made was much more impactful across the teams, and that was to add a penalty for each pipeline based on how "congested" a.k.a. how many other teams have that same pipeline. The idea was to significantly reduce the ratings of pipelines with a ton of teams without completely ruining it; even a team with a T3 Central Florida pipeline will probably be able to get a good chunk of Florida recruits despite all the battling, because there are just so many recruits in the pipeline. I landed on the following formula: Each T5 within a pipeline penalized its rating by 1%, each T4 penalized its rating by 0.8%, each T3 0.6%, each T2 0.4%, and each T1 0.2%. The sum of all the pipelines, weighted by tier, becomes the "congestion penalty."
The end result is this:
As you can see, pipelines such as New Mexico and Big Sky received VERY little Congestion Penalty, but the bigger pipelines such as East/North Texas were penalized pretty hard. Based on these numbers it looks a little harsh, but in practice it actually didn't change the rankings of the pipelines much at all.
I present you, the Zenkei Rating. Named for u/zenkei18, who came up with the entire idea for the congestion rating, the percentage for each tier... basically the whole thought experiment. So MASSIVE shoutout to them! The Zenkei Rating accounts for the new point awards for each tier and the Congestion Penalty tied to the pipeline.
As noted above, the actual rankings of each individual pipeline didn't shift too much, with only Pennsylvania and South Florida going down more than 1 spot, and only Southern California moving up more than 1 spot. However, the difference becomes much more apparent when considered across all of a team's pipelines.
I'm not going to post the entire rankings as I did before: full rankings can be found in the link to my master Sheets workbook which will contain all of my modifications. This link is located in my Complete Pipeline List- College Football 25 post, and I will add it here once I get confirmation from the mods that I'm able to do so. But I will show the biggest winners and losers from this update:
The California glowup in this update is real
... And that's it! Thank you to everyone who has found the pipeline lists and rankings useful, as well as everyone that pointed out potential improvements! There are a couple more analyses I would like to perform and share with you all over some time, namely 1) What does a coach's primary pipeline do and what is the upper limit for its capabilities? and 2) Which teams benefit the most from the Program Builder tier boosts, based on the Zenkei Pipeline Ratings?
For the latter, it will simply take me too much time to do this on my own, so I am putting out an open request to anyone that would be willing to help me put the legwork in to get each team's Program Builder-boosted pipelines recorded. The way I see it, one person would have to achieve Program Builder on 134 teams to get accurate results, but just 10 people would have to get it on 13-14 teams to get the same results, so anyone willing to help out would be greatly appreciated!
Enjoy-- Coach Croot out!
Posted Aug 16, 2024, 1:15 AM UTC