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School Resources, Social Media Capabilities, and Recruiting Effectiveness in the National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I Football Bowl Subdivision

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2019, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Kinesiology.
In the highly dynamic and competitive environment of major college football, recruiting has often been called the “lifeblood” of a program (Wasserman, 2017). Schools spend tremendous financial and time resources to identify and attract the athletes they desire (Caro & Benton, 2014). For years, scholars, coaches, and athletic administrators have attempted to determine which school resources—e.g., academic reputation, athletic reputation, head coach reputation, facilities, etc.—are most important in achieving recruiting effectiveness (Dumond, Lynch, & Platania, 2008; Pitts & Evans, 2016). The classic framework for understanding this relationship is the resource-based view (RBV) of the firm, which argues that organizations should seek and obtain valuable, rare, inimitable, and non-substitutable resources to achieve sustained competitive advantage (Barney, 1991). Given the amount of scholarship already focused on the relationship between school resources and recruiting effectiveness, Magnusen, Kim, Perrewe, and Ferris (2014) called for researchers to turn their attention to how schools can best leverage these assets. A similar movement in the broader organizational studies literature has criticized RBV as tautological, causally ambiguous, and overly simplistic (Barney & Zajac, 1994; Kraaijenbring, Spender, & Groen, 2010). One response has been to extend RBV to the theory of dynamic capabilities (DC; Teece, 1997). DC are “organizational and strategic routines by which firms achieve new resource configurations as markets emerge, collide, split, evolve, and die” (Eisenhardt & Martin, 2000, p. 1107). In the context of intercollegiate athletics recruiting, as the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) deregulated some online contact between coaches and potential student-athletes, social media capabilities have emerged as one possible example of DC (Bigsby, Ohlmann, & Zhao, 2017, 2019). The purpose of this research was to examine how schools utilize their social media capabilities to leverage other institutional resources to achieve recruiting effectiveness. Data were gathered for every NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) program from 2009-2019 (1,375 team-year observations clustered within 131 schools). Composite variables were created for six dimensions of organizational resources: academic performance reputation, athletic development reputation, historic athletic performance reputation, recent athletic performance reputation, head coach reputation, and physical capital assets. Two control variables (i.e., geographic proximity to talent, and power conference status) were also included. It was hypothesized that social media capabilities would partially mediate the relationship between school resources and recruiting effectiveness. A design-based multilevel structural equation modeling framework (Rabe-Hesketh, Skrondal, & Zheng, 2012) was utilized to conduct this analysis. A series of five exploratory factor analyses (EFA), seven confirmatory factor analyses (CFA), and two structural equation models (SEM) were used to analyze the data. After the final EFA, four composite factors were found: historical reputation, head coach reputation, academic reputation, and recent performance. Stadium capacity loaded with the historical reputation variables, while indoor practice facility and on-campus stadium were dropped from the model. Professional development ended up with just two indicators, which would not allow the model to be identified in the confirmatory phase, so it was also dropped from the measurement model. The model was then validated via seven rounds of CFA, including a number of modifications (mostly inter-item error correlations), and several measures of good fit were met. NFL Pro Bowlers (as a single-item indicator of professional development) were added back to the model for testing the hypotheses via SEM. Although the SEM models did not meet standards of good fit, several school resources were found to predict recruiting effectiveness. Historical reputation, professional development, and recent performance were significantly and positively related to recruiting effectiveness, while head coach reputation was significantly and negatively related, and academic reputation had no significant relationship. Further, social media capabilities were not significantly related to recruiting effectiveness, meaning that there was no mediation effect found. This study made several important theoretical and practical contributions. First, there was strong support for RBV, but little support social media capabilities as DC in college football recruiting. It is possible that the true effects of social media are masked by several limitations in the study’s design and data collection procedures. Future research will include more robust data to measure schools’ social media capabilities. This study will also help practitioners better understand that merely posting a high volume of tweets may not be an effective recruiting tool—schools might be wise to be more intentional regarding the content and timing of their social media posts. Future research in this area will also focus on content analysis of social media posts and understanding the psychological impact of pervasive social media use in the recruiting process.
Brian Turner (Advisor)
Leeann Lower-Hoppe (Committee Member)
Donna Pastore (Committee Member)
227 p.

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Evans, J. O. (2019). School Resources, Social Media Capabilities, and Recruiting Effectiveness in the National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I Football Bowl Subdivision [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1563223839479203

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Evans, James. School Resources, Social Media Capabilities, and Recruiting Effectiveness in the National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I Football Bowl Subdivision. 2019. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1563223839479203.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Evans, James. "School Resources, Social Media Capabilities, and Recruiting Effectiveness in the National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I Football Bowl Subdivision." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2019. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1563223839479203

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)