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College  | Story | 3/17/2010

UCLA, Vanderbilt Highlight Flaws In Pre-Season Polls

Allan Simpson
PART I

The 2010 Division I college season is four weeks along, and many of the nation’s top-ranked teams are just now revving up for the heart of their schedule, conference play.
Though it’s still too early to get an accurate handle on how some clubs stack up, it’s evident by how some have performed through four weekends of play what the balance of the season might hold in store for them. Defending College World Series champion Louisiana State (13-2), Texas (13-3) and Virginia (12-3) were at the top of every pre-season poll and have pretty much performed as expected. They remain heavy favorites to reach the College World Series.

Arizona State (15-0), Florida State (13-2), Georgia Tech (13-1) and Texas Christian (12-2) also had high hopes for 2010, and haven’t found much reason to date to be disappointed with the direction their seasons have taken. Conversely, consensus pre-season top 10 teams like UC Irvine (9-6), Cal State Fullerton (7-7) and Rice (10-7) have all been a little slow out of the gate and may be less certain that they’ll fulfill expectations.

Two of the more noteworthy teams that got off to hot starts are UCLA (13-0) and Vanderbilt (14-1), which have either edged into the top 10 in some weekly polls or are knocking on the door of others. Had they not played against each other early in the 2010 season in California, they both might have been perfect after four weekends, though Vanderbilt was subsequently roughed up, 17-2, Tuesday night by Western Kentucky.

And yet, neither UCLA nor Vanderbilt was much of a factor in any of six college polls that got wide national circulation prior to the 2010 season, and were both missing altogether in the USA Today and rivals.com rankings. No poll had UCLA ranked higher than 20, or Vanderbilt higher than 17.

PG Crosschecker, meanwhile, authored its own pre-season rankings, more for the purpose of displaying on the Perfect Game website, and had Vanderbilt at No. 12 and UCLA at No. 16.

The two schools lost a combined 56 games in 2009, but it was evident even then that they had a wealth of untapped talent, or key players that were hurt, and the likelihood was reasonably high that these players would make a pronounced impact on their clubs one year later. Both schools also had significant recruiting classes, further adding to the 2010 dynamic. Yet they were largely overlooked entering the season.

It’s the nature of pre-season polls to focus on returning players and emphasize their past performance. In that regard, the rankings are a statistics-based judgment on which teams are likely to perform best in the coming season, based on what they did in the past.

That can be a dangerous assumption where players aged 19 to 23 are involved, as they mature at different rates and don’t always perform consistently from one year to the next. And if the performance of several players changes appreciably, that can have a profound impact on how a team performs overall from one year to the next.

In that regard as it applies to a related topic, it’s a fallacy to base pre-season college All-America team selections almost exclusively on what players did the previous season, as tends to occur. If a player has legitimate pro-level talent, chances are he’ll perform better every year as his college career progresses. Numerous players who have the raw ability to warrant pre-season All-America consideration and ultimately perform to that level in the coming season are routinely overlooked, mainly because they did not post big-enough numbers in the preceding season.

To this day, Baseball America has major league scouting directors play an instrumental role in picking its pre-season college All-America teams. That was a practice I initiated in the publication’s very first year, almost 30 years ago, as I wanted the best indicator possible of what a player might do in the coming season, and not be forced to rely on what he did in the previous one. I put my faith in the trained eye of a scout, not statistics that can often be deceiving in their interpretation.

With Perfect Game being a scouting-based organization, the company’s philosophy is to look ahead when judging players, not behind. Players are valued on their upside or potential, not past performance. The practice applies to teams, just as it does to players.

Predictably, any PG Crosschecker team rankings, pre-season or otherwise, will rely heavily on scouting reports and scouting-based information. We’re more interested in what a player, or group of players, might do in the future, and less on what they did in the past. Accurate, informed scouting data most often provides the best information to accurately gauge whether certain teams have the capacity to improve from one year to the next.

Just as scouts will judge a player’s upside on factors like his physical attributes, raw tools and other relevant factors, and less on how he has performed in the past, PG Crosschecker has adapted that approach in its team rankings, whether college, junior college, travel-ball or high school.

Just because a college player hit .231 one year, it’s not an accurate barometer that he’ll hit .231 the next. He might be less mature, physically and/or mentally, in year one and further away in developing his talent to the fullest, but if he’s athletic and has impressive tools that are ready to blossom, chances are he might be in line for a breakout in year two.

Similarly, if a player is in the process of rebounding from an injury, or might have hit his stride in summer-league competition or fall practice, it’s realistic to expect he’ll become a more integral part of his team’s success the next spring. It’s also very relevant to factor in newcomers who might make an immediate impact, especially talented freshmen and proven junior-college transfers. All too often these factors aren’t given enough consideration in the impact they can make on a college team.

While conventional scouting logic is most often applied to an individual player, it can apply to an entire team, as well.

UCLA and Vanderbilt provide examples of two schools that may not have gotten their due recognition this year as they have a number of players who either underperformed in 2009 or were slowed by injury. But many of those players are now healthy or are coming off breakthrough performances in summer ball or fall practice.

We’ll take a closer look at both those schools in Part II of this exercise. We’ve talked to both team’s coaches, UCLA’s John Savage and Vanderbilt’s Tim Corbin, and with their insight we’ll try and get a better understanding why it might have been a mistake for so many pre-season polls to overlook those teams specifically this season.
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