Attrition is an under-utilized means of looking at the effectiveness of resource management in college and professional football. Since I’m a college football enthusiast, I will focus there first. In the succeeding months, as the college football season unfolds, recruiting will regain its annual place in the thoughts of program-watchers. Recruiting certainly has its value, and a very high one, in the overall health of a football program. Indeed, if an organization (you will see me referring to college football teams as organizations very often) does not recruit talent, getting it firmly ensconced -or in collegiate terms matriculated- you can largely write off the chances for long-term sustained success. But just as valuable a piece of this complex puzzle is player retention and development. We’ll set aside development for now, as the subject of future article, so that we can focus on player retention, or the minimization of program attrition.

Due to the duration-constrained nature of tenures in college football programs, a critical success factor is that teams retain their talent. It is one reason you will see coaches making concerted efforts to convince highly productive players who are candidates for the NFL draft to return for their senior seasons. Very often they will have the player’s best interests in mind when they do this, and the balance of team need versus player needs is a very delicate matter weighing the risks and rewards of returning. In the era of limited scholarships and early entry into the professional ranks, program attrition is one of 5 or 6 key factors that if not minimized will destroy a program in short order. The reason simply comes down to numbers. Position balance in talent recruiting is the idea that given the number of players that must contribute at a high level, the physical requirements of competition, and the consequent rotation requirements, the persistence of error-prone talent identification, the maturation lag in on-the-field achievement, and the probabilistic reality of likely attrition, a great deal of pressure, and therefore great emphasis, is placed on resource-maximization -of which the key attribute is player retention.

The playing life of a collegiate football player is a perishable resource. Years lost are years you cannot get back, and downs lost or ill-played are downs, and potentially victories, that you can’t get back. This is a classic optimization problem, and one that in the typical organization will be addressed by Operations Research specialists. But college football programs are not typical organizations. The corporate environment has only a statistical limit on tenure, and not a regulatory one. Let me explain: there is no rule that forces the departure of an employee after a certain number of years. Even retirement is in most cases voluntary, and in any event is only after a lengthy period of potential contribution. Certainly there is a statistical chance that a current employee will leave after a given number of productive years, but there are no hard limits here. On the other hand, a college program is resource-limited by regulatory regime. Given the maturation-lag we have previously mentioned, this places especial constraints on the resource optimization efforts of the college program. It is the differentiation in productivity arising from maturity and development that raises the opportunity cost of recruiting in high-attrition programs. More directly, if you are losing players whom you have invested in, you cannot simply replace them with incoming freshmen in all -or even most- cases and still maintain success. It is for this reason we are able to treat player productivity as a capacity-constrained resource. While there are potentially an unlimited number of players, those lost are ordinarily of more value to the organization than those gained -at least immediately. It is due to this time lag associated with the productivity of incoming resources that recruiting classes are ordinarily to be judged two years in, and not prior to matriculation –except as a forecasting exercise. If you are judging players earlier than two years (end of the RS Frosh or the true Soph season), then you likely have recruiting class imbalances that will need to be addressed very soon. Of course, it is obvious that early entry affects this equation, and one must be careful not to disregard the progress of the true freshman or the redshirt. Indeed, it may be optimal to maximize the playing time of the most talented recruits, being as you will lose them sooner, and this is a utility factor that applies to all organizations, and not simply collegiate football programs. In the business world, you tend to lose your best talent quickly -perhaps only a bit more slowly than your worst talent, which tends to fall victim to any one of a number of forms of attrition. Retaining and maximizing the various levels of accomplishment will be the chief occupation of the program analyst or program manager. While this role is not to be found in the majority of college football programs, it is to be found on the organizational charts of the very best.

While it is a truism that great player retention is a value to be pursued assiduously by the successful program, given the costs of player development in time and wins, it is not always clear-cut. There are cases in which attrition of a less productive player and his replacement by a higher potential player is a maximization of utility because his upside is greater than the combined forms of time-cost and immediate productivity decreases. In the simplest terms, this means that if you didn’t take in talent that had a high probability of productivity and longevity in the first place, it will improve outcomes if your program incurs some minimal attrition. Again, this is an optimization problem in which the intuitive answer of absolute attrition minimization is likely the wrong answer -most especially for those programs with greater talent depth. This shows the mutual dependency of attrition-minimization and both recruiting and resource development. If you have been deficient in the latter areas, your approach to attrition will be different than it would otherwise be.

This is where we enter an area of no little controversy. Some successful programs are modeled on a high-attrition scheme wherein the opportunity cost of recruiting is weighed against the maturation lag and it is determined that program washout is less expensive than mistakes in recruiting. This strategy is pursued by programs under great pressure to win immediately, regardless of the cost to future recruiting due to the negative model-feedback of this high attrition. High attrition programs become less attractive over time, on average. This strategy also tends to be pursued by programs that are less certain of the quality of their player development and productivity maximization. In the long run, they may alter their approach to attrition given changes in their ability to maximize the resources on hand.

A couple of programs specifically come to mind when examining the high-attrition model: the University of Alabama under Nick Saban, and the University of Michigan under Rich Rodriguez. In the former case we see a program that has come under a great deal of scrutiny due to high levels of pre-matriculation attrition. It is useful to categorize attrition into several types: pre-matriculation, contributor, starter, and difference maker. We have adopted this categorization because we view it as more realistic to treat matriculation according to the contribution level of the player, rather than simply his program-maturity. It does us little good to focus on the attrition of non-contributors, since they have only a negative utility. It is easily seen that difference-maker attrition is the most disastrous form. It has a measurable impact on the achievement of program goals because the loss is a player who changes the outcome of games. Though it is sometimes the case, it is rare that there is so-called addition by subtraction when considering difference-maker attrition. In the case of Rodriguez at Michigan, program attrition is occurring to some extent at a greater-than-average level among the contributor class, and thus has depleted program resource maturity and placed increasing pressure on subsequent recruiting classes. This is a recipe for failure unless player development and recruiting in the future can compensate for such losses, and it remains to be seen whether this is the case at Michigan. If Rodriquez fails in the latter two areas, he will continue to fail on the field, and we will witness a case of the dangers of the high-attrition model. Among position coaches in the college ranks, this strategy has also been pursued by Rick Trickett, offensive line coach at Florida State, but for the sake of brevity, we’ll have to pass over the latter without further comment but to say that this is a more narrow application of the high attrition model, and possesses a slightly different dynamic that may lower the risk of the tactic.

There are different attrition causes which must be considered: non-matriculation, injury, non-contribution, high-contribution, academic, behavioral and legal, and eligibility-related. It is clear that their utility cannot be treated the same. For example, we cannot regard high-contribution attrition due to early entry the same as we do, say, non-contribution attrition. It will be noted by many that non-contribution is not true attrition, as a player is not necessarily lost in this scenario. Nevertheless, since non-contribution affects productivity maximization, it is to be treated schematically as position depletion if that player is utilizing one of a limited number of scholarships. His utilization of annually-constrained eligibility has a negative effect on team productivity and position productivity and depth. The following are the main forms of program attrition, and some of the associated symptoms of their appearance:

• Non-matriculation attrition: roster depletion, position depth and competition issues, class imbalance
• Non-contribution attrition: sub-optimal productivity, opportunity cost feedback into recruiting, long-term slot under-performance
• Injury attrition: position depth and competition issues, opportunity cost feedback into recruiting, roster depletion, class imbalance

In terms of the values we wish to maximize, here are the values and their typical organizational effects:

• Position depth: increases competition for available playing opportunities and maximizes productivity per snap, and has an exponential effect on in-game competitions in latter quarters
• Class balance: decreases pressure on subsequent recruiting classes and minimizes risk-taking in the character-athletic potential equation, ensures greater stability of team leadership, ensures maximization of program experience and maturity, and decreases the downstream effects of position-overloading on class limits and therefore on risk of position depth depletion in other positions, and its subsequent feedback into competition and snap or opportunity maximization
• Productivity: given limited scholarships as well as limited tenure and its correlative of limited plays, productivity is highly important as a target of maximization. One of the things coaches can control to a certain extent is effort

The University of Florida under Urban Meyer makes a highly public case for its players giving maximum effort for 4-6 seconds per play. This emphasis on effort is an attempt at productivity maximization that places particular burdens on position depth and can only be accomplished if recruiting, retention, and development have all been relatively successful. This is a high risk/high reward strategy, as player exhaustion is a key factor in late game losses, especially against quality opponents, with which the SEC is replete. It is another truism that in the SEC you cannot “take a day off.” At Florida, you cannot take a play off. It is commonly assumed that this is the approach taken by all coaches when, in fact, effort-limitation is a means some coaches use to achieve a maximization of effective snaps. In this scenario, players look for the best opportunities to apply especial effort in order to achieve a greater return on investment, while saving energy for later plays. This is typically only found in programs that have little depth, or breadth of productivity distribution. And while a coach would likely never verbally encourage energy retention and selectivity of output, it in fact is a tacit strategy that is employed in just such programs. With respect to the risk involved in utilizing “maximum effort” at UF, we can summarize it by saying that you had better be a very “deep” team by position.

With program attrition having such a critical impact on overall program achievement in the short term, it is interesting that the subject receives so little overt attention in the media, from coaches to analysts to sports writers. Certainly key injuries, transfers, and trades are discussed, but merely as isolated, unrelated phenomena, and rarely within the context of total program resource optimization. To be sure, most coaches and program administrators are not accustomed to thinking (much less planning) on the level of such seeming abstractions. But it is clear that more and more often, your opponent is doing just that: approaching the game in a systematic way that (as we mentioned last week) focuses on quantitative methods of analyzing your strengths and weaknesses with the goal of placing more aspects of performance under your control. This common coaching instinct regarding the unrelated character of the different forms of program attrition is incorrect. Incidents of attrition are indeed related, and ordinarily point to an ad hoc or entirely absent regime of risk management, of which attrition is the most important dimension affecting performance.

We mentioned earlier that attrition is a classic optimization problem, and this means that it falls within the purview of 3 related disciplines: Operations Research, Industrial Engineering, and scientific Risk Management. We also mentioned earlier that having an ad hoc approach to attrition will (in the long run) get you beat –a lot. But I’d like to take a moment to briefly discuss this notion of the interrelatedness of the forms of attrition. At first glance, this statement is counter-intuitive. How can injuries be related to non-matriculation, or early-entry be related to non-contribution? Let us be more clear: we are not claiming that these phenomena are causally related; clearly injuries do not cause non-matriculation. What we are pointing to is that they are related to one another as symptoms of a greater, more global cause: and that is a piece-meal risk management strategy. A comprehensive risk management strategy, with intensive focus on attrition-optimization will see incidence rates of ALL forms of negative attrition reduced, if effective management principles are applied to each area. Knowing when to bring in expertise in certain areas is key to this process. We’ve described it in the past as “knowing what you don’t know.” Now, in the modern business climate it can be a career risk to admit ignorance, but at the top of the management pyramid (and there is a management pyramid) you can’t afford to pretend you know things that you don’t know. Comprehensive risk management will address the following areas:

• Getting kids in school (on-boarding), or into the regime of transition management and life-skill enhancement programs for professional clubs, fully understanding the academic risks of each athlete in the recruiting pipeline by early focus on qualification
• Correctly assessing the areas of risk on an individual basis, whether academic, social, economic, or athletic
• Devising a comprehensive development management plan for each player, to which accountability and reward are attached in a transparent, rational way
• Implementing tactics for the minimization of injury
• Life counseling to address the issues of early entry, human maturation, and other, related concerns of players and their families
• A family outreach organization that incorporates family members and close friends into a close-knit, community-based
• Understanding and being involved with the recreational needs of players and helping to improve their decision-making and understanding of life-consequences
• A quantitative approach to resource management that is risk-aware, recognizes areas of high attrition risk, and uses this as feedback into the resource acquisition plan: this affects the recruiting board, player development, and position management.

This is but a partial list.

In the preceding article, we have addressed some of the major issues confronting coach-managers in the area of player attrition. In Part 2 of this article we’ll address the other part of the picture: staff continuity and the attrition in program management personnel. I hope you’ve enjoyed this brief glimpse into a key aspect of program achievement, and we look forward to completing the series next week. God bless and successful coaching!

To debut the Southern Football Insider weblog, I want to talk a little bit about what distinguishes Urban Meyer and his approach to coaching from many of the other coaches he finds himself across the field from on Fall Saturdays. While it is certainly true that Urban Meyer is an excellent “ball” coach: having good tactical instincts on game day, understanding of substitution patterns to create mismatches, being flexible enough to abandon aspects of a game plan that aren’t working and to improvise a new one. These are all hallmarks of excellence in the tactical areas of game day coaching. But candor and understanding of the level of competence in the coaching ranks of the SEC would force us to admit that there are a number of coaches who do these things well -in some cases perhaps better than Urban Meyer. If that is the case, what is it that sets him apart as a coach whose success is now virtually predictable? Is the secret to be found in recruiting? Certainly this is partly the case, but it’s not all, nor even half the picture. Many programs in the SEC recruit and evaluate young talent at a very high level, as evidenced by not only subjective recruiting rankings from the recruiting entertainment services such as ESPN, but also on the field results, which is the ultimate measure of recruiting success.

But even the latter is not a consistent predictor of success. By way of example we might cite the case of the Georgia Bulldogs coach Mark Richt, who by all measures is a truly gifted recruiter. In fact, this is so much the case that there have been seasons during which Mark Richt had a more talented team (on paper) than Urban Meyer, and yet lost the match. These losses occurred not through game day blunders (there have been those, but mostly early in his career as a head coach), but before the even the lights came on in the stadium, or the coin was tossed that day. Recall, it was only two seasons ago that “the celebration” marked a ‘W’ for Richt against UF, whose record versus Meyer is an unremarkable 1-4. This is not a statistic that will win you many admirers in Georgia, and not a statistic that reflects the truth of the recruiting picture: Georgia has had equal or greater sheer talent in the recent past. In last year’s debacle for the Bulldogs, they had (we are informed by the experts) the better QB and RB corps in Matt Stafford (the #1 selection in the 2009 NFL Draft) and Knowshon Moreno (a first rounder), a wide receiver as good as any on Florida’s roster in A. J. Green. Their OL, while suffering some injuries, had depth and talent, including All-SEC stalwart LT Clint Boling. On defense, Geno Atkins and WLB phenom Rennie Curran are a sure-fire NFL prospects, as was Asher Allen (22nd pick, 3rd Round of the 2009 NFL Draft). But beyond Georgia, Alabama, Ole Miss, and LSU have recruited at a very high level in recent years. Both Bama and LSU have coaches who have won recent BCS championships, while Ole Miss is headed up by erstwhile veteran Houston Nutt, whose Arkansas team made it to the SEC Championship back in 2006. The 2008 NFL draft saw both Nutt’s feature backs (McFadden and Jones) go in the 1st Round. His recruiting cupboard, stocked full by former head coach Ed Orgeron has an NFL QB and RB, and a DL that would make some NFL clubs green with envy -not to mention All-SEC OT Michael Oher who was taken with the 22nd pick in the 1st Round in 2009. In the East, the Old Ball coach has a player or two as well, and Tennessee always has top-shelf defensive talent. It isn’t merely recruiting.

Though Florida has some advantages in the aforementioned areas, the aspect that sets Urban Meyer apart from other coaches is seen in two little words: organizational development. As evidence of this, you have no further to look than the comments of the characteristically frank Nick Saban, head football coach at Alabama. Often, the best way to evaluate a coach is by what his peers are saying about him. Respect is grudgingly awarded by such savvy, driven, demanding figures as you’ll find in SEC coaching offices. So when Nick Saban speaks about Urban Meyer, I listen intently. At the most recent edition of the SEC’s annual Media Days event, Saban was asked what things he liked about coach Urban Meyer. In case you missed them, his responses were revealing:

Q. Obviously, you have ties to Bill Belichick. Urban Meyer has also befriended him. Do you see any Belichick tendencies in Coach Meyer? What do you think he’s been able to do to kind of turn Florida into the national championship program it’s become?

COACH SABAN: I think, first of all, Urban is a great coach, surrounds himself with outstanding people, has a good staff. They work about as hard as anybody I know. I mean, we’re kind of a blue-collar program. We have a tremendous amount of respect for that.

I know that Bill is like that. But I think Urban was like that before he ever met Bill. I think that’s why they have a tremendous amount of success in recruiting, and they do a phenomenal job of developing the players that they have.

So I can’t make any comparisons to know what their relationship is. I don’t know that. I know I coached for four years with Bill Belichick. He was an outstanding coach. I probably learned as much from him in terms of organization, football, management, defining roles so that people understand what’s expected of them, as anybody that I’ve ever been around. Certainly, you know, his success proves that what he does, the process that he uses, it’s very effective.

Saban is saying these things about a man in between him and his goals -an opponent. Truculent ST. Nick is not known as a flatterer. Both Saban and Meyer come to the SEC out of the Bill Belichick coaching tree. Respectively, by way of an assistant’s role under Belichick, and the other through a close personal relationship that has left a deep imprint. The similarities between these rivals coaches are more remarkable than their differences. But more to our point is their focus on organization development. When you read the foregoing quote from Saban, a few things stand out. Not merely the driven personality of Meyer, but the organizational skills he’s inherited through his close relationship with Belichik, and other coaching mentors. The same themes are prevalent in both the Alabama program and Meyer’s: player development: what you do with a talented player once he gets there is the difference between potential and accomplishment; organizational development: ensuring that a winning team culture is produced, with precisely articulated values and standards, and processes in place to achieve measurable goals.

Urban Meyer and staff measure everything. He is reported to have once joked that he was having his trainers measure the time it takes for players to make the trip from the locker rooms to the practice field, and how he could tell what to expect from practice based on this statistic. The story is apocryphal, of course, but the point is very salient: we don’t leave anything to chance. Meyer has been described by his peers as being one of the most organized and focused individuals they’ve encountered in the coaching profession, and this is reflected in the precision with which the various aspects of the program are run. Game planning is an area where Meyer’s focus on precision and measurement are fully realized. While film study and tendency notes are common features in successful game planning, Urban Meyer incorporates intensive statistical analysis and a robust quantitative approach that is fairly rare in college football, and much more the province of the most esoteric professional clubs. A baseball enthusiast and former minor league player, Meyer is a list keeper, and understands the importance of measurement in quality control and repeatability. You can’t learn from your mistakes if you’re guessing where you made them. Steve Spurrier once remarked that “statistics are for losers.” We all know what he meant: you don’t make excuses for losing. But taken at face value, this statement is misleading. Meyer made mention of this when he later publicly opined that, in fact, statistics are very important, and indicated that UF almost literally measures everything. This is business process engineering, and successful companies (and college sports teams are companies) use these approaches to their benefit.

But beyond the numbers, there’s motivation and value inculcation. Meyer’s background in psychology gives him insight into the organizational ethos that permeates a football team, a perspective often lacking in even highly competitive programs. This “corporate” approach is reflected in seemingly trivial characteristics that are synergistically greater than the sum of their parts. Getting one hundred adolescent football players to focus on one goal, to maintain a high degree of personal accountability, to internalize organizational values and standards, and to be willing to sacrifice short term desires for long term goals is not something you merely teach, its something you have to model, develop, cultivate, measure, and personally emulate. And Florida does an excellent job in this area. It’s one of the things recruits notice when they visit: the camaraderie, the esprit, the focus and intensity, the pace and attention to detail. These are things that have to be constantly monitored and underscored, and to do this, practices must be developed to make these activities permanent features of the program. It is in these areas where Florida is really hands-down better than its competition. Again in this instance, the words of coach Saban are instructive:

“People who are role models for the principles and values of the organization, who buy in and understand the vision of what the organization is trying to accomplish, and have the personality to inspire other people to the vision. You know, that’s what team chemistry and leadership is all about.

“I think it’s also important that you establish a work ethic on your team, that your team understands they’re working to dominate the competition. It’s not relative to what they think hard work is; it’s what they need to do to dominate the competition in a very competitive, difficult, tough league, with a very difficult, tough schedule.

“It’s important that you have a group that is responsible for their own self-determination in terms of doing their job. You know, when I worked with Bill Belichick, we only had one sign in the whole building, and that was: Do your job. And it was defined for everybody, from the janitor, to the secretary, to the strength coach, to the equipment man to the coaches, to the players, everybody had an expectation of what their responsibility was to execute their job.”

This is Nick Saban saying that organizational development is the key to success on the field, and it’s him saying that Meyer does it better than anyone in the league. It’s in the subtext, but it’s there. You can sense the grudging admiration. Moreover, in response to a question about abnormal program attrition, Saban had this to say,

“We have a demanding program. I mean, when I say ‘demanding program,’ I’m not talking about football. We have a personal development aspect to our program that there’s principles and values in the organization relative to developing a successful philosophy, creating the right kind of habits, thoughts, habits and priorities that are going to help you make good decisions, whether it’s the Pacific Institute coming in, whether it’s a peer intervention program that address behavioral issues, drugs, alcohol, gambling, spiritual development, how to treat the opposite sex, macho man stuff, running your mouth, getting in fights.”

Organizational development. Meyer has implemented formal and informal roles that are a part of that process: from motivational expert Hiram deFries, to Director of Community and Player Relations Terry Jackson, to Program Coordinator Mark Pantoni -each having a role in inculcating the values and goals of the team.

So when we evaluate the football program at the University of Florida, and the means by which it has achieved its goals, we should look directly to the organizational genius of Urban Meyer as much or more so than his tactical acumen or recruiting prowess, which taken together, are the recipe for his spectacular rise to the top of his profession.

We’ve moved from our former GC blog page “Naphtaville” to these here upscale digs. Hope you will visit frequently to read about SEC Football from an “insider’s” perspective -that is, from the point of view of those who “do” football. Y’all come back now! Hear?