Comparing Willie Fritz's Recruiting with Tulane's Past
Visualizing how Tulane's Recruiting has Taken a Step Up
Data visualization and analysis by FTW newcomer Jack Chaz. Write-up by FTW Editor JP Gooderham. Follow FTW on Twitter, Facebook, and our podcast.
Against the backdrop of a season that epitomizes chaos — with programs across CFB scrambling to decide if a season would happen and then later finding games against unexpected opponents on the fly — Tulane Football has reached a state of relative stability for the first time this century.
Yes, the Green Wave faces those same big questions about this season, but Tulane enters 2020 fresh off back-to-back bowl wins for the first time in program history. The leadership of the program has found a constant under Willie Fritz, whose recent success has been bolstered by staff consistency and retaining key coaches.
If the big picture looks bright to you as a Tulane fan, one of the key vehicles for how Coach Willie Fritz and his staff have taken this step up is through recruiting. In this piece, we’re going to take a look back at the 6 recruiting classes of the #Fritzmas Era compared to the 6 that preceded Fritz (under Bob Toledo and Curtis Johnson) to break down a few important trends that are emerging.
The Average Tulane Recruiting Class under Fritz is Much Better (and Improving)
First, we took a look at every player recruited from 2010 through the potential 2021 class for 12 seasons’ worth of data. To assess how good these classes were, we turned to recruiting analysis website 247.
For those who do not closely follow recruiting: 247 sets a recruit score that is a combination of several other recruiting sites — this is meant to be a composite to provide greater accuracy than any one source. It allows you to compare a “high 3-star” who likely is being recruiting by big programs with a “low 3-star” who may be under the radar.
With this in mind, we mapped out every class from Tulane’s highest ranked to lowest ranked recruit each year. As shown below, Willie Fritz’s first class in 2016 initially looked like a step back, especially with limited time to work with and a new, unproven brand of Tulane Football. That said, the 2016 class featured several notable diamonds in the rough, including 2-star Gadsen, AL wide receiver Darnell Mooney who would turn into a 5th-round draft pick for the Chicago Bears in 2020. Not bad for an offense everyone described as the triple option.
What becomes clear is how the Fritz recruiting strategy would take hold in the years that followed, especially after the Wave started to find on-field success with back-to-back winning seasons.
That’s a really positive trend that we are starting to see up and to the right for the average Tulane commit as well as the top players in each of these recent classes. So we’re starting to see the average Tulane player improve before coming to campus, and the “top” players in those classes tend to be seen as higher upside by the recruiting services.
Let’s turn next to how the footprint of Fritz’s recruiting map has changed Tulane Football.
Fritz has stretched the Tulane map from Texas to Georgia
Let’s take a look at where commits in the classes from 2010-2016 came from. As shown below, both Toledo and Johnson heavily concentrated in Louisiana. CJ even made this a hallmark of his campaign, citing the University of Miami model and his desire to create the “State of Tulane” given the high density of talent in the state.
That didn’t really happen, in practice. Yes, we were able to recruit many players from Louisiana, but the later CJ classes featured a number of flyers who were not the “sure thing” players from the state.
We are now going to show you two maps here: the pre-Fritz era and the post-Fritz era. Each state will contain the number of total commits as well as their average ranking on 247.
Back in 2017, with Fritz’s second National Signing Day, it was clear he was doing something different. He was starting to aggressively tap into out of state players from Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. He told the press on that signing day
In his comments that day (in 2017 after one season at Tulane), Fritz said:
We want to sign the best guys no matter wherever they're from, there's no doubt about that. But we've gotta show the student-athletes here in the state that we're going to provide a consistent winner. That's something we've got to get them to believe.
Fritz saw that within Louisiana, Tulane had earned a questionable amount of respect and buy-in from local coaches. We’ve had many eras that kicked off when coaches have said things were going to change, but this hadn’t often translated into a meaningful difference on the field (or in how long these coaches would be able to stay in Uptown).
So in 2016 and beyond, the Tulane recruiting map changes pretty radically as Fritz and his staff head on the road to sell the Tulane brand: a top academic institution in a fun town that can still be within driving distance of a ton of really strong high school football locales.
As you can see:
Texas goes from a backwater with 7 commits over 6 years to 24, including players like Amare Jones for Fritz
Mississippi, similarly, turns from a dead zone with 1 commit in 6 years to 16
Alabama and Georgia are not far behind, moving from 3 commits to 11 for Alabama and 5 commits to 14 for Georgia (where Fritz previously had roots at Georgia Southern)
While the overall footprint for Fritz and his staff has certainly expanded, I think you could easily argue that the quality of Louisiana recruits may be starting to increase even with fewer overall commits from in-state.
Incoming freshman Angelo Anderson (John Curtis) ranks as the #3 best recruit of the post-2000 era, for instance. By sustaining success and hopefully pushing the program to the point where we can contend in the AAC, Fritz will look to capitalize on this cultural shift in-state as well as across the southeast.
I am all in with coach Fritz leading Tulane football. This is now his program and if the Tulane administration allows the program to flourish, they will cash in big time in this up and coming conference. By 2025, this program will be one of the top G5 programs to get poached.