If you’re a college football junkie, you certainly read about the fuss that was made when Cal Defensive Line coach and Recruiting Coordinator Tosh Lupoi left to join Steve Sarkisian‘s staff at Washington.

Message boards and social media sites were abuzz stating that Sarkisian had pulled a “coup” in stealing away one of the nation’s “ace recruiters” from Cal. The way some people were talking, you would have thought Nick Saban had resigned at Alabama to take over the Auburn head coaching job.

Regular readers of CBTN will remember that we did a series of articles last summer titled Recruiting or Coaching. These articles were broken down into Exhibits A, B and C. After looking at the available data, we wanted to challenge the idea that certain coaches had “drastic” effects on recruiting.

Once we looked at the recruiting data for schools that have had at least two coaches for multiple years over the last decade, we found that it was rare to see a coach come in and have a “drastic” impact (moving the recruiting rank by more than 10 spots one way or the other) on recruiting. We also found that in the few cases where a coach had drastically improved the recruiting compared to his predecessor that same coach often had a lower winning percentage.

This brings us to the adulation we witnessed over Tosh Lupoi. It certainly doesn’t hurt that Coach Lupoi was named the Rivals “Recruiting Coordinator of the Year” for 2010. These kinds of accolades, while certainly well deserved, often lead to an excessive trust in “experts”. If the Food Network tells us the top 10 BBQ places in America, those have to be the best without question right? If a PhD, Harvard-educated economist tells us what the economy is going to do over the next 18 months, he must know what he’s talking about, right?

Let’s dig into the numbers a bit and see if this much praise for Coach Lupoi is indeed warranted in regards to his recruiting abilities.

All rankings below are according to Scout.com and Rivals.com.

Next, let’s take a look at Cal’s recruiting ranks year-by-year from 2002-2011:

By looking at the above numbers, there is no doubt that Cal’s recruiting classes were moving in a positive direction in the last two years under Lupoi’s guidance. That being said, there doesn’t appear to be anything drastic happening here. In fact, the only thing drastic we have noticed is the 10% decline in Cal’s overall and conference winning percentage.

Does recruiting matter? Of course it does!

Having good players certainly makes it easier to win. Some people misunderstand us and believe that we think recruiting doesn’t matter or that having better players doesn’t matter. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Our point is that the data tells us that recruiting has more to do with the school, conference, region of the country, academics, etc. and less to do with a specific coach. For the most part, schools are going to get who they are going to get, with a few exceptions to the rule as pointed out in our articles linked above.

Would we rather have a pitching staff full of guys throwing 95+ MPH than one composed of guys throwing in the low 80′s? Most certainly. However, that isn’t the reality in college football. The odds of Duke having top 10 classes consistently and Georgia having classes ranked in the 50′s consistently is next to zero, no matter who is coaching.  The truly great coaches are the ones that can take their staff throwing 95+ and have them reach their full potential, or the coach that can take his staff of low 80′s throwers and have them overachieve through COACHING.

In conclusion, we are sure that Coach Lupoi is indeed a great recruiter, but the fact of the matter is that many other schools out there have great recruiters as well. He most certainly will have an impact at Washington, but the numbers tell us that his impact might not be as drastic as one would think. From what we hear and understand, Tosh Lupoi will have a much greater impact as a coach than as a recruiter, and in that regard, Washington certainly did hire an “Ace”.