Fitz gets best bang for his buck in recruiting

Maybe Pat Fitzgerald should have been a salesman. With his closing rate, he would’ve been a millionaire.

(Of course, he already is a millionaire, pulling in somewhere around $4 million per year as head coach at Northwestern. And what is recruiting, really, if it isn’t sales?)

Regardless, the scholarship offer numbers for each Power Five school that Rivals’ Blair Sanderson tweeted on Wednesday show that Fitzgerald and his Northwestern staff may be the most efficient recruiters in the country.

Fitzgerald likes to talk about using a rifle, not shotgun approach to recruiting and how he and his staff do their research and get to know a recruit before making an offer. He scoffs at “non-commitable” offers given out at other schools; all of his, he says, are valid and valued.

The numbers back him up.

The Wildcats have offered just 68 prospects, according to the Rivals database, the second-lowest number out in the nation, ranking 64th out of 65. Yet Northwestern is already sitting at 16 commits for its Class of 2018 and may be taking just one or two – if any – more players.

That means that Fitzgerald’s hit rate is almost 24 percent, or one for every 4.25 offers. That’s an astounding percentage when you take a look at the scholarship offers other schools have given out like breath mints.

Iowa State leads the nation with a whopping 388 offers, nearly six times as many as Northwestern. So far, that wallpapering approach has netted only 11 commits, or one for every 35.3 offers.

The only school that has offered fewer prospects than Northwestern is Stanford, with a startling 32. But that surgical strategy has yielded just four commits so far, so expect that number to go up.

There are some interesting numbers on the list:

- So-called academic schools have relatively high numbers. Vanderbilt is tied with LSU for 20th with 217 offers, Duke is 43rd with 166, and Notre Dame is tied for 45th with 160. Those totals makes one wonder whether their academic standards, while likely higher than most schools, may not be as demanding as Northwestern’s. That, or they are extending offers without doing due diligence on the players’ transcripts.

- Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh, who created quite a controversy a couple years ago by over-recruiting and forcing players to decommit, has extended 215 offers. That’s the same number as Alabama, a program one would think could afford to be more selective and go after only the cream-of-the-crop.

- The Big Ten’s rookie coaches seem to be taking a volume approach to offers. Indiana’s Tom Allen (288 offers), Purdue’s Jeff Brohm (249) and Minnesota’s PJ Fleck (245) are ranked second, third and fourth in the league, respectively, trailing only Rutgers, with ranks third overall with 345.

There are some caveats here. These offer numbers are generally reported by players, players’ parents or high school coaches. Offers can be confirmed with college coaches, but still, some numbers may be slightly inaccurate.

Do these offer numbers prove that Fitzgerald recruits better than other coaches? Not by a long shot. His class, currently ranked 31st in the nation, will probably end up somewhere in the 40s or 50s nationally, which is par for the course for an NU class. On the field, while Fitzgerald has reached a level of sustainable success at Northwestern never before achieved, his Wildcats have never really come close to a conference or division title.

But these numbers do show that Northwestern targets players who are the right fit better than just about anyone. And once the coaches get a prospect on their radar, they close the deal better than just about anyone, too.

Fitzgerald’s closing rate of 23.5 percent dwarfs even coaching legends like Nick Saban (7 for 215, 3.3 percent) and Urban Meyer (15 for 166, 9.0). The closest is Washington’s Chris Petersen (11 for 69, 15.9). Even if Saban were to land an average class of 25 without sending out a single other offer, his closing percentage would be only 11.6 percent; Meyer’s would be 16.1.

More than all that, however, these numbers reflect that when it comes to Fitzgerald’s claims that an offer means something at Northwestern, the coach puts his money where his mouth is.