By Michael Szvetitz, Sports Editor
Auburn-Opelika (Ala.) News
What started out as a simple story that stemmed from a conversation Knoxville News Sentinel Tennessee football beat reporter Evan Woodbery had with UT athletic director Dave Hart turned into something much, much bigger.
Unlike many SEC football programs, which have solid recruiting bases within a 100-mile radius of their school, the University of Tennessee is different.
If you draw a circle around Knoxville, those area recruits, as a whole, wouldn’t match up to the ones found around, say, Tuscaloosa or Auburn, Ala., or Gainesville, Fla., or Athens, Ga.
The Vols get most of their recruits from outside of east Tennessee, which creates a national search and all the potential pitfalls that come with trying to get out-of-state players to commit to a program they didn’t grow up around.
While searching for a new head coach to replace Derek Dooley, the Tennessee athletic department put together a recruiting packet and presented it to applicants to show them some of the challenges UT faced in recruiting, and to get a coach’s feedback on how they’d handle the hurdles the program faces.
“That piqued my interest, and it started as a simple, small story, then ballooned up,” Woodbery said during the morning session of the APSE Southeast Region meeting on April 29 in Birmingham, Ala.
More than 450 Tennessee football players and 19 recruiting classes later, Woodbery had compiled a database that gave his readers a window into Tennessee recruiting as far as where the Vols were getting their players.
“We wanted to show where they get the athletes from and what was going on when they were consistently nationally ranked to the last few years when they weren’t,” Woodbery said. “It was a good way of saying, ‘Here’s where they were, here’s where they are now and here’s where they were in the middle.’”
Woodbery started with former head coach Phillip Fulmer’s first full recruiting class in 1994 — which also happened to be Peyton Manning’s class — and entered every player that signed with UT football up to the current roster.
There were five criteria that Woodbery entered into his “simple” Google spreadsheet: geography, earning a letter, All-SEC, drafted by NFL and spent at least one season on NFL roster.
That data was able to tell him the geographic midpoint of each class and how successful they were during their time on the team, and, conversely, how good the team was while those recruits were there.
Woodbery was careful in his story, which was accompanied graphs and charts in both print and online, that geography wouldn’t fully explain the reasons for success or failure each football season, but it did verify some areas in the country that have been good to the Vols in terms of getting quality athletes who have helped the team have success.
“Geography is just one issue,” Woodbery said. “It’s interesting, but it’s not going to solve all the problems. It did verify that there are prospects in some areas that are ‘getable’ for coaches.”
The hardest part of the story was just entering the data, Woodbery said.
“It was tedious,” he said, adding he did a lot of the data entry over a few weeks to help break it up.
After the numbers were in, though, putting together the charts — Woodbery used mostly Google software and applications — was pretty easy. And telling.
“I think it answered some questions … it had things that people already knew,” Woodbery said. “I think a lot of the conclusions did interest people.”
