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!