Some quick math here:
Kentucky - 1.00 (NBA players per McDonald's All-American dating back to 2000)
Duke - 0.52
UNC - 0.56
Kansas - 0.93
UConn - 2.00
Florida - 1.09
UCLA - 1.09
Arizona - 1.00
Georgia Tech - 1.33
Texas - 0.62
That's the top ten. As you can see, UConn is far and away the best school in the country at developing talent using those conversions. Of course, it's an imperfect method. A lot of the kids that were McDonald's All-Americans coming out of high school were probably vastly overrated, and some criminally underrated. Scouts get these things wrong, a lot, as those numbers bare out. But holy God, if this isn't a testament to Calhoun's other-worldly ability to find and develop talent, I don't know what is. Schools like UNC and Duke are at a bit of a dis-advantage using this formula because of the sheer number of McDonald's All-Americans they attract (some of them are bound to fail simply due to playing time), but damn, Calhoun is lapping some of these schools three, four times. If you travel back to 1990, the numbers are even more overwhelming in favor of UConn, and we're not even considering the fact that once upon a time, before Boone and Armstrong and Marcus and Rip washed out, we had even more guys in the NBA.
I can't help but look at these numbers and think recruits need to be continually hammered over the head with them when they're visiting. If our marketing and recruiting gurus aren't creating pie charts and bar graphs to express just how lopsided these numbers are, they aren't doing their job. Nobody develops pros like UConn and you don't really need to look much further than this.
