Cherry picking? I looked at ALL schools in Nebraska and their success in football, volleyball, and basketball. I looked at TEN years of success data, looking for factors that predicted success. The first five years of the sample were used to see which factores best predicted the success in the last five years of the data. All the data comes from a system where classification by enrollment already exists, so all of my observations are from within an enrollment-classification system. In other words, nothing I looked at imagines a system where you don't start classification with enrollment numbers. I simply looked at other factors that could be used to adjust enrollment classification to create better competitive classes. Two factors proved to best predict success:
1) low F/R%
2) success (teams that won the last five years are more likely to win the next five)
One factor that didn't correlate well at all really surprised me
3) placement inside of classification (are you in the top/middle/bottom third of enrollment in your classification?
I really expected that would make a difference. It didn't show up statistically.
I tested several other factors (all from other state's classification experiments) and none of them produced conclusive results.
Here's the
link the presentation. I think it still has access to the linked data as well, but it has been several years since the re-classification committee looked at it all, nodded a lot, asked a fee questions, and then did nothing with it because this topic is way too hot a potato for them to want to handle.