It's a matter of faith among college football fans that good recruiting leads to winning. A few skeptics suggest causation runs the other direction -- teams recruit well because they win. And there is a third hypothesis -- both winning and recruiting are caused by a third factor, maybe coaching or just general "goodness."I’ve tried to look at some data to see if we can figure it out.
As usual I've half-assed this analysis, but hopefully we can get some insights anyway.At the very least we might learn how to think about the debate.My basic idea is to look at historical winning and recruiting and try to figure out how they are correlated and whether we can point to one as the cause of the other.