023: Transfer window
Radar charts and portal combat.
Rosters are built in professional soccer during transfer windows. These are periods of time where players are sold and bought. It’s a market1.
It’s the part of the sport that is dedicated to rumor and speculation. It’s known as the silly season because players are transferred for obscene amounts of money.
Do you think this is how college football and basketball are starting to feel?
For example, North Carolina football (14 transfers), men’s basketball (four transfers), and women’s basketball (two transfers) all have players entering the portal2.
In fact, thousands of players are in the portal today.
The way coaches build rosters is changing. Deion Sanders uses a 40-40-20 model or 40 percent of players are graduate transfers, 40 percent are undergraduates, and 20 percent are entering from high school.
Fans are used to recruiting rankings with four or five stars.
But how do we rank players in the portal or how do you identify that talent?
My guess is we don’t know yet. As an example, Brady Manek was ranked 110th in 2021. Seems off.
There are companies with loads of data, media publications that rate the talent, and a trove of free statistical data. Of course, coaches are actually the ones doing the scouting, watching film, and meeting the players.
Given collegiate competition is superior to high school competition, and the players have more experience, and there is more reliable data available - I wonder if its easier to recruit from the portal or via the high school ranks?
Fans do not know. After all, this is the part of the sport that is dedicated to rumor and speculation.
Radars of roster attributes
The Sweet 16 is in full swing. Last week we discussed how this is the most experienced NCAA Tournament and teams lack continuity.
A follow up of that idea is to try and understand the shape of a roster. Four roster attributes are used on kenpom:
Average height
Minutes continuity
Experience
Bench minutes
The goal was to visualize the distribution of a team’s roster. We’re using a radar chart. A perfect square would mean the team has the max possible value (ranking) across all attributes.
The charts include the last 16 standing teams in the men’s hoops bracket, plus the big four schools on tobacco road (North Carolina, Duke, NC State, Wake Forest).
A few examples:
Duke: not quite a perfect triangle with maximum height, a healthy amount of bench minutes, and little experience and continuity. Young talent.
Kansas State: an isosceles type shape with lots of experience, but scare continuity/height/bench minutes. This is your transfer team. Four of the five starters have played at multiple schools.
North Carolina: a perfect triangle with nearly no bench minutes, but almost equally rated height/continuity/experience. Experienced players in years and minutes.
There are so many things you could change about college basketball. The unbalanced schedules, the NET, the fact they’re use different basketballs, the officiating, quadrants, bracketologists, and more.
Despite all of that, the product can be downright divine to watch. When Markquis Nowell, a transfer from Arkansas-Little Rock, has the ball on a damn string, it doesn’t get much better.
The product’s most important asset? The players. And giving the players the opportunity to earn money and change schools is part of the product now.
Can you imagine if there is ever an in-season transfer window?
It might feel silly, but maybe that’s a good thing.
A note about this newsletter moving forward
This newsletter will continue to be free moving forward. My goal remains to practice communicating with data, and if you choose to subscribe along the way, that sounds good too. You can find the code for the radar charts in this post here.
The idea to compare these two things comes from this Unexpected Points podcast episode. StatsBomb is doing some fascinating work with college football player data.
The portal is objectively a bad name. Right?