Pick Six: Estimating the Return to School Selection for Elite College Football Recruits

Abstract

The role of the university in the market for football talent is that of an interme- diary: high school players must pass through the NCAA en route to playing at the professional level in the NFL. As such, the choice of the university for elite football recruits is one that is taken seriously, given the way in which it serves as a critical final hurdle before a potentially lucrative professional career. While conventional wis- dom would suggest that the quality of the college program for which a recruit chooses to play may impact professional outcomes, I find, using college football recruitment data from ESPN and techniques from the literature on the returns to education, that controlling for unobservable individual-level attributes reveals that school choice has no statistically significant effect on probability of being drafted. Rather, I find that individual attributes are far more predictive of outcomes than school choice, suggesting misallocation of time and effort as well as suboptimal decision-making on the part of elite college football recruits.