The turf is always greener: Predicting decommitments in college football recruiting using Twitter data

Abstract

We utilize the wealth of data related to American college football recruitment as a laboratory for studying the impact of social networks on organizational turnover. We combine data about athletes' recruiting activities and college choices with data from their Twitter social networks to predict decommitments over time - specifically, which athletes will decommit from their current college in a given month. Our results demonstrate the value of considering online social networks for decommitment predictions. Models incorporating social media data consistently outperform the baseline model containing only features derived from recruiting and institutional data. In the realm of athletic recruiting, our research can help coaches identify recruits who are more likely to decommit and enable them to proactively adjust recruiting strategies.