I'm still trudging along with my all-P5 website, but I've reached a new milestone where I can start displaying program-wide data for any P5 school and how they compare to the rest of P5. There's no public webpage to go to yet, this is still all behind-the-scenes.
Here are all the features on Purdue's page:
Starting with some basic info. Rankings aren't displayed here for some technical reasons, on the final page it will display where Purdue ranks in these fields. But I can tell you that Purdue ranks 55th (out of 65) in average stars per player and 56th in total class points. The Hazell era did a number on Purdue here. Elsewhere I plan on a feature where you can filter by current head coach and Brohm-era Purdue will fare a lot better.
Those other 3 fields take a little explaining. I have a field all over this site (and my current Big Ten-only site) called Projected Draft Picks where I take a recruit's rating and see what % of recruits around that rating wind up getting drafted, but it requires adjusting based on which school they commit to. Because a school like Washington does an excellent job at taking in 4-star recruits and turning them into NFL players, while Nebraska is a 4-star graveyard. The Unadjusted Proj. Draft Picks field here ignores the school-based adjustment, so based purely on ratings Purdue was expected to have 10.10 draft picks between their 2011 and 2017 recruiting classes. They wound up having only 7. (It cuts off at 2017 because to jury is still out on whether the 2018 class onwards made the NFL.) Purdue actually ranked dead last (65th) in unadjusted projected draft picks, but this mostly accounted for Hazell-era players. But Purdue's 7 draft picks ranked 57th, and that difference of -3.10 expected picks actually ranks a decent 39th overall. This is the basis for my adjusted projected draft picks, Purdue takes a small hit for each recruit but is mostly in the middle of P5.
In case you're wondering the five best programs at producing more NFL draft picks than expected are Ohio State (at +19.32!), Washington, LSU, Florida, and Penn State. The 5 worst are Arizona, South Carolina, USC, Tennessee, and then finally Texas (-12.31!).
Here you can see the P5 rankings get generated for each field. The higher the ranking the more green it is, the lower the ranking the more red it is. Borrowing from KenPom, I made the # of Players column go from orange to purple instead since I didn't feel like more players was necessarily a good thing by itself, or less players worse. I also put a neat little list of major events for each school that could have impacted the classes. These are usually just coaching and conference changes, but I also made everyone a note that there was no in-person recruiting in 2021.
We went through truly awful recruiting classes (on-paper) in the Hazell era. 2017 technically counts as a Brohm class, but 2018 is when there was finally an uptick. And the last five years under Brohm have been pretty solid, except for that 2021 class where you can blame COVID or the recruiting coordinator or what have you.
Now for some graphing staples of mine.
I would say that most P5 programs don't see crazy trends like this where you can see the decline in the Hazell era and then a giant rebound in the Brohm era. But it's pretty fun to see here for Purdue (now that things are good again at least).
This table used to be green, now it's this cool heat map-looking thing. It also scales based on the program, so if I pull up Bama it will go up to 5-stars so it's more useful. I like this one because it really highlights the increased floor of Purdue's classes under Brohm. We basically don't take recruits who are under 3 stars anymore, when it used to be almost half the class.
A new feature entirely, I imported all P5 coaches so that I can break classes down by coach. I also got to test out my "Fire Coach" button on Scott Frost!
Danny Hope kind of got screwed by the 2011 cut-off as 2011 was by far his worst class and drags down his average here. Other than that this is what you'd expect: Hazell bad, Brohm good.
This chart will automatically switch to school colors, a nice touch I must say.
Not a shock that offensive recruiting is higher-rated than defensive recruiting in the Brohm era, although it's worth noting that defense eclipsed offense in 2023 thanks to Hagen's defensive line recruiting.
Purdue's below the Big Ten and P5 average, which is not a surprise. This chart might be more interesting to compare the Big Ten average to P5 as a whole, with offensive line being the best-performing position compared to all of P5. Although it's Purdue's second-worst position in average stars.
No shocker that Indiana is Purdue's most-populated state, although I'm a little surprised how close it is to Florida. If you look at the average stars column Purdue tends to get higher-rated players from closer by, while seemingly picking up the scraps in states like Florida, Texas, and Georgia. I imagine that is consistent with most programs but I'll have to check for sure.
And finally I have a "leaderboard" for each school, displaying their 15 highest-rated recruits since 2011. 13 of Purdue's 15 were recruited by Brohm.
Here are all the features on Purdue's page:
Starting with some basic info. Rankings aren't displayed here for some technical reasons, on the final page it will display where Purdue ranks in these fields. But I can tell you that Purdue ranks 55th (out of 65) in average stars per player and 56th in total class points. The Hazell era did a number on Purdue here. Elsewhere I plan on a feature where you can filter by current head coach and Brohm-era Purdue will fare a lot better.
Those other 3 fields take a little explaining. I have a field all over this site (and my current Big Ten-only site) called Projected Draft Picks where I take a recruit's rating and see what % of recruits around that rating wind up getting drafted, but it requires adjusting based on which school they commit to. Because a school like Washington does an excellent job at taking in 4-star recruits and turning them into NFL players, while Nebraska is a 4-star graveyard. The Unadjusted Proj. Draft Picks field here ignores the school-based adjustment, so based purely on ratings Purdue was expected to have 10.10 draft picks between their 2011 and 2017 recruiting classes. They wound up having only 7. (It cuts off at 2017 because to jury is still out on whether the 2018 class onwards made the NFL.) Purdue actually ranked dead last (65th) in unadjusted projected draft picks, but this mostly accounted for Hazell-era players. But Purdue's 7 draft picks ranked 57th, and that difference of -3.10 expected picks actually ranks a decent 39th overall. This is the basis for my adjusted projected draft picks, Purdue takes a small hit for each recruit but is mostly in the middle of P5.
In case you're wondering the five best programs at producing more NFL draft picks than expected are Ohio State (at +19.32!), Washington, LSU, Florida, and Penn State. The 5 worst are Arizona, South Carolina, USC, Tennessee, and then finally Texas (-12.31!).
Here you can see the P5 rankings get generated for each field. The higher the ranking the more green it is, the lower the ranking the more red it is. Borrowing from KenPom, I made the # of Players column go from orange to purple instead since I didn't feel like more players was necessarily a good thing by itself, or less players worse. I also put a neat little list of major events for each school that could have impacted the classes. These are usually just coaching and conference changes, but I also made everyone a note that there was no in-person recruiting in 2021.
We went through truly awful recruiting classes (on-paper) in the Hazell era. 2017 technically counts as a Brohm class, but 2018 is when there was finally an uptick. And the last five years under Brohm have been pretty solid, except for that 2021 class where you can blame COVID or the recruiting coordinator or what have you.
Now for some graphing staples of mine.
I would say that most P5 programs don't see crazy trends like this where you can see the decline in the Hazell era and then a giant rebound in the Brohm era. But it's pretty fun to see here for Purdue (now that things are good again at least).
This table used to be green, now it's this cool heat map-looking thing. It also scales based on the program, so if I pull up Bama it will go up to 5-stars so it's more useful. I like this one because it really highlights the increased floor of Purdue's classes under Brohm. We basically don't take recruits who are under 3 stars anymore, when it used to be almost half the class.
A new feature entirely, I imported all P5 coaches so that I can break classes down by coach. I also got to test out my "Fire Coach" button on Scott Frost!
Danny Hope kind of got screwed by the 2011 cut-off as 2011 was by far his worst class and drags down his average here. Other than that this is what you'd expect: Hazell bad, Brohm good.
This chart will automatically switch to school colors, a nice touch I must say.
Not a shock that offensive recruiting is higher-rated than defensive recruiting in the Brohm era, although it's worth noting that defense eclipsed offense in 2023 thanks to Hagen's defensive line recruiting.
Purdue's below the Big Ten and P5 average, which is not a surprise. This chart might be more interesting to compare the Big Ten average to P5 as a whole, with offensive line being the best-performing position compared to all of P5. Although it's Purdue's second-worst position in average stars.
No shocker that Indiana is Purdue's most-populated state, although I'm a little surprised how close it is to Florida. If you look at the average stars column Purdue tends to get higher-rated players from closer by, while seemingly picking up the scraps in states like Florida, Texas, and Georgia. I imagine that is consistent with most programs but I'll have to check for sure.
And finally I have a "leaderboard" for each school, displaying their 15 highest-rated recruits since 2011. 13 of Purdue's 15 were recruited by Brohm.
