The Stetson School of Business and Economics at Mercer University provides on its website a model which it claims was developed in order “to capture, to the best extent possible, a statistical equation to capture the decision making process” of the nation’s top-rated student-athletes coming out of high school with the intention of playing football at the collegiate level.

Noting the significance of acquiring a competitive recruiting class in terms of revenue which could be generated in the future, researchers involved with the creation of the College Football Recruiting Prediction Model — or CFRPM, for short — built a database whose aim was evaluating the characteristics and decisions of nearly 3400 high school football recruits comprising the recruiting classes of 2002, 2003, and 2004. Using a special form of what the Mercer website refers to as a probit — or generalized linear — model, and recognizing that most recruits generally choose from a grouping of four schools in making their final commitment to a particular program, researchers aimed to create an econometric system — mathematical and statistical techniques used to predict solutions to specific economic problems — that could help athletic departments and their corresponding football programs at the NCAA level more accurately predict what a particular recruit might — or, in fact, might not — do in terms of making a formal decision to play at one school versus another.

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