Online and Off the Field: Predicting School Choice in College Football Recruiting from Social Media Data

This study explores predictors of school choice decisions in American college football recruitment. We combine data about individual athletes’ recruiting activities with social media data to predict which school the athlete will choose among those that have offered him a scholarship. While previous works have approached school choice as a rational decision process, our results indicate that a bounded rationality model incorporating social factors and heuristics may be more appropriate. We explore how the actions taken by athletes during recruitment can be interpreted as early signals of athletes’ preferences and find that models incorporating social media features consistently outperform the baseline model with only off-line recruiting features. In addition to better understanding the school choice decision, this work can help coaches to effectively allocate recruiting resources and inform social media strategies during recruitment.