Recruiting Steals and Where to Find Them

As the pay-for-play era of college basketball begins, what are the states and countries where college teams can get the most value for their money?

Over the past decade, I’ve seen a shift in how my office coworkers react when they find out that I also work in scouting. Back in 2015, the most common reaction was confused looks while I tried to explain how drafts work to the people in a soccer-brained country like mine.

The most common reaction over the past few years has been: “Oh, like in that (Hustle) movie with Adam Sandler?”

While using Hustle as an example is an effective way to illustrate the goal and a small part of the process of scouting, what I don’t tell my coworkers is just how difficult it is to find a situation like the one in the movie today because of how streamlined the draft process already is. For a potential difference-making 22-year-old to fly under NBA radars, he would’ve also had to fly under college, AAU, high school, and professional team academy radars for the previous 5-8 years. There are too many filters prior to the NBA level that streamline the process and reduce the pool of potential NBA players once draft day rolls around.

As much as people love to say that the draft is a crapshoot, the multiple years of data points on these players, the somewhat similar levels of competition, the combine and workouts, the hours upon hours of film study that the NBA scouting departments conduct, the background checks and interviews, all make the NBA Draft, at worse, an educated guess.

If you want to talk about a crapshoot, we can talk about college recruiting.

There were 536,668 high school basketball players in the 2023-24 season, according to a survey conducted by the National Federation of State High School Associations. While the process is, much like the NBA, streamlined by the AAU circuits, elite prep schools, high school camps, and recruiting rankings that follow players from very early in their careers, the sheer number of potential college athletes in activity makes this process, in theory, more prone to recruiting steals and busts.

With college basketball advancing each year towards a model that directly pays players, finding a recruiting steal is key not only to find competitive advantages, but also to wisely spend your money, which is necessary in a 357-team league where the programs at the bottom of the pyramid compete (in theory) for the same national title as the teams on the top, but on a hundredth of their budget.

This piece is about where to find recruiting steals, trying to find out if there are states or countries where players tend to overperform their pre-NCAA expectations. At the risk of becoming the basketball version of those recipe sites that will tell you unnecessary, loosely-related family stories before giving you the actual recipe, before we get to the Where, I need to get into the Why and the How.

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How to define a recruiting steal

It’s easy to pinpoint an NBA draft steal. There are expectations associated with each draft pick, and the players who exceed those expectations are considered steals. For the college level, however, it can get a bit more tricky.

The main difference between the draft and recruiting is the system they are mimicking. If in the socialism of the NBA draft, the higher the pick, the bigger the expectation is, then in the capitalism of the recruiting landscape, we should hold higher expectations for the haves than the have-nots.

In other words, to define a recruiting steal, I will compare a player’s performance against the recruiting power of the school they played for during their first year in college.

Let’s define what those two words will mean from now on.

Recruiting Power: The average 247Sports recruiting ranking for a school during the last ten high school classes, normalized in a 0-100 scale, where 100 would be a school with an average ranking of 1 for the last 10 years and 0 would be a school that was ranked 357th in average in the same time lapse.

While the “right” way of measuring expectations for a player coming out of high school would be to go through the number and type of offers that a player received, not all offers are public, and even the best sites at tracking them can miss offers¹. So we’ll use Recruiting Power as a reliable proxy of the expectations of a player coming out of high school.

For the sake of simplicity, we’ll only consider players who committed to play D-I straight out of high school, leaving out players coming out of the JUCO or D-II ranks, as the JUCO and transfer recruiting landscapes are completely different and it’s already difficult enough to collect all the info from where the D-I recruits came from.

Performance: While defining recruiting power was somewhat easy, defining performance is a bit more complicated, and there’s no “right” way to do so. It’s mostly about your personal preference in terms of measuring a player’s impact and how you weigh wildly different career arcs and lengths.

Let’s set some filters first. We’ll be looking at all players who entered college between 2014 and 2023. A player’s season will only count if a player played at least 20 games and averaged 20 minutes per game.

Out of all available catch-all metrics to evaluate a player’s college performance, Basketball Reference’s BPM was the one ranked as the best one² in a survey conducted by Bryan Kalborsky at HoopsHype, so we’re going with that.

Then, we need to define if we’re going to take a cumulative or a peak approach. With the first approach, you’d be favoring players who spent multiple years in college (shout out to the two seven-year seniors on the list, Jaylin Ingram and Chuck O’Bannon Jr.). In this case, I’ll be going with the second approach, taking each player’s peak year to focus on the impact that they made in just one season.

Finally, for the sake of normalization and to avoid having to manually pick which season we would take for a player that played multiple senior seasons due to COVID or redshirt years, we’re going to use college years instead of classes to rank. So instead of ranking as freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors, we’ll be ranking years 1, 2, 3, and 4+.

We’ll rank all qualifying seasons from best to worst in terms of BPM, and we’re going to convert that to percentile rankings for each year because it should make our lives easier once we do the comparison. Finally, we’re going to take each player’s peak season.

So now that we have enough elements to define a recruiting steal, we can list the players who have the biggest positive differential between their peak BPM performance and the Recruiting Power of the team they committed to out of high school.

Where do you find recruiting steals?

With the differential now set for all players, we can put them on a map and look at the trends to see where recruiting steals are generally found. In order to do that, we’re going to map all states in a scatter plot, with total NCAA players over the last 10 high school classes in one axis and the number of players that rank in the upper thirtieth percentile in performance vs. recruiting power differential. In other words, our recruiting steals or overperformers.

The distance above or below the trendline for each state should indicate if a state is overrecruited or underrecruited.

Observations

When looking at the map, there are two initial takeaways, and both of them, interestingly, have to do with College Football.

The North Dakota State approach: One of the biggest dynasties in college sports is the North Dakota State football program. The Bison have won 10 of the last 14 National Championships at the FCS level (the second-highest level of college football) and a big part of their on-the-field success can be attributed to their success in recruiting their own state and a nearby region that is often underrecruited by teams in power conferences because of how remote it is.

Those power teams leave value on the table by not going to recruit in that northern part of the Great Plains because it’s far easier to recruit in the large metropolitan areas located in the South, Pacific, and the Midwest than to do it in states with lower population density and more limited accessibility.

There’s definitely a similar approach that could be taken for basketball, as states with low population density such as Iowa (14th lowest population density), Minnesota (21st), Wisconsin (26th), Nebraska (8th), North and South Dakota (4th and 5th) have a higher rate of overperformers than some of the more densely populated states.

The College Football exodus: Speaking of football, states in the southeast have some of the lowest rates of overperformers in the country. Some of it could also be attributed to football: two-sport athletes are a common sight in states with a bigger college football presence, and by the time high school prospects graduate, there’s a significant number of players who choose to continue playing football over basketball.

Looking outside the States

So far, we’ve only looked at domestic recruiting, so let’s see what happens when we bring international recruiting into the mix.

The graph shows something that our entire team was preaching during preached during our (short-lived) run at ID Prospects:³ even with all the downsides (not always being able to watch the player in person, dealing with agents, competing not only against other colleges, but also against professional teams), there’s a ton of potential value in recruiting internationally.

The map looks decidedly different from the USA one, as there isn’t a common geographic thread: underrecruited and overrecruited countries are pretty evenly spread out across all regions. The geographic thread might not be there, but there's definitely a basketball one: how unfriendly the domestic leagues are for prospects to see minutes from a young age.

Underrecruited countries like Spain, Italy, and Australia have some of the most competitive professional leagues in the world, where it’s difficult for young players to find roster spots, let alone see consistent minutes at the top flight. This gives top prospects from those countries more reasons to look at the college route than prospects in overrecruited countries like France, Lithuania, Serbia, and Germany—which make it easier for their prospects to stay home and get significant playing time at the highest levels of domestic competition.

The final example I want to mention is the UK, which is also one of the most underrecruited countries by this exercise and has produced some of the most notorious recruiting steals like Great Osobor, Amari Williams, and Akwasi Yeboah. This also could be linked to their domestic league. While the British Basketball League has been on the rise over the past few years, it’s still not at the level of the more competitive European leagues, which makes British top prospects look elsewhere to advance their basketball careers, including opportunities in college.

This map, however, is bound to change as college continues to become one of the main sources of income for top international prospects, who will look more and more to the college route. Last year, we had Egor Demin and Kasparas Jakucionis coming to the NCAA; the word in international basketball circles is that, even in a weaker prospect class like this year’s, we should expect a similar talent migration once May rolls around and international leagues come to an end.

Final Thoughts

There are various takeaways from this exercise, but the main one I want to leave with is that the road to finding recruiting steals is a tough one. There’s value to be found in the states that nobody wants to go scout, in the public schools that national scouting services aren’t watching, and in the international tournaments that nobody attends.

If you only scout the big cities, the nearby states, the AAU teams in the top circuits, and the players who go to top camps, you’ll be recruiting the same players that everybody is recruiting. That’s not the way to find recruiting steals.

Again, there were 536,668 high school basketball players in the 2023-24 season. I understand the necessity to streamline your recruiting, but the only way to find more value than your budget allows you to is not by streamlining; it’s by trailblazing. This piece should give you the map to do so.

1. If you think Egor Demin and Kasparas Jakucionis had only one offer each when they were in Europe, then I have a bridge to sell you.

2. BPM actually came up at number six in that list, but to my knowledge, none of the top five stats are available for the college game. At least not publicly.

3. Now-defunct scouting service that covered international prospects, founded by Andrew Mastin and me.