Why Twitter Analysis Shows Jerrod Heard may indeed be Texas’ QB of the Future

Texas signed 23 players last week, only one of them a quarterback, who just happened to be the highest-rated member of the recruiting class, according to rivals.com. So, naturally, Denton Guyer’s Jerrod Heard could be the 2014 commitment Longhorns fans are the most excited about.

Heard, simply being the only quarterback in the class, is seen as someone who should eventually assume a leadership position in the Texas locker room. His two state championship rings, more than 11,000 total yards and nearly 100 touchdowns aside, a quick Twitter analysis may show that Heard will be more than ready to assume that leadership role.

Below is a graphic of the aforementioned network, with each node representing a certain player and links between each node representing a connection between players where one follows the other or they both follow each other. [s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level2)] There are 13 of the 23 signees represented in the network here as six of them don’t have Twitter accounts and four others don’t use them enough to be included in this analysis.

Taking a closer look at how the members of the Longhorns’ 2014 football recruiting class are connected on Twitter reveals some interesting things, including that Heard is the most well-connected in the group. He has an in-degree of eight, meaning that eight of the other 12

Below is the same graphic visualization of that network, with Heard and his connections highlighted in red:

It’s a quarterback’s job to bring a team together and keep them that way when things get tough. That job is a lot easier to do when you have solid off-field relationships with your teammates, and this may be a good indicator that Heard indeed does have those relationships in place.

As far as the group as a whole, the graph density is 0.37, meaning that 37 percent of the possible connections between the 13 players are currently connections. Another metric of overall connectivity in the network is called geodesic distance, which measures the average number of steps it takes to get from any given person in the network to another. For this network, the average geodesic distance is 1.704.

That number is reflective of the fact that about 80 percent of the connections are reciprocated, meaning that when one player in this network follows another, that player follows them back approximately 80 percent of the time.

Another important person in this network is Texas City wide receiver D’Onta Foreman, Armanti’s twin brother and fellow 2014 Longhorns signee. Betweenness centrality measures how well a person connects parts of a network that aren’t well-connected without that person.

D’Onta Foreman has a betweenness centrality of 45.67, more than twice that of any other player in the network. That can largely be attributed to the fact that he is the only one with a link to Chris Nelson, the defensive tackle from Florida who was one of two to commit to Texas on Signing Day.

The other was fellow defensive tackle Poona Ford, a four-star prospect, according to ESPN. Nelson himself is the only one in the network with a connection to Ford, further explaining D’Onta Foreman’s sky-high betweenness centrality score. Without him in the network, Ford and Nelson would no longer be a part of it, instead having a one-link network to themselves. Below is the network again, this time with Foreman’s node and connections highlighted in red:

While Heard is the most connected person in the network, according to in-degree (how many people are following him) and out-degree (how many people he is following), other metrics indicate that South Grand Prairie defensive back Jason Hall may be the best-connected player in the network.

Hall has the highest closeness centrality score at 0.059, which basically means he’s closer, on average, to everyone else in the network than anyone else. He also has the highest eigenvector centrality score (0.122), which accounts for how well-connected his connections are.

Below is the network one more time, this time with Hall and his connections highlighted in red:

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Question for the fans: how do you feel about the role twitter and social media plays in modern-day recruiting? Sound off below.

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