midwest
The map you see below is a compilation of all the players that have been on the U of M roster starting with Bo and ending with RichRod.
There is a lot of information here...but lets start with the Michigan/Ohio region and work our way out to the rest of the country.
Michigan vs Ohio
There has been a lot of discussion on this board about the Great Wall of Tressel, and how he shut down the border. Lets take a look at how our roster was compiled with Michigan and Ohio kids over the past few decades.
A couple of things stick out here...
- During Bo's era 1 out of 4 kids on the team were from Ohio. From Lloyd's tenure and to the present it was 1 out of 10.
- Our presence in Ohio started to decline long before Tressel got there.
- RichRod always caught a lot of flack for not recruiting Michigan players, but he averaged more Michigan players then previous coaches (Yes, I know we are dealing with sample size, and most of his roster was still Lloyd's players.)
Here is a look at some of the raw data I was working with...
Bo's Midwest:
| Rank | State | # Players | Percentage |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | MI | 326 | 41.48% |
| 2 | OH | 201 | 25.57% |
| 3 | IL | 80 | 10.18% |
| 4 | IN | 21 | 2.67% |
| 5 | WI | 12 | 1.53% |
| 6 | MN | 1 | 0.13% |
| Totals | 641 | 81.55% |
Moeller's Midwest:
| Rank | State | # Players | Percentage |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | MI | 55 | 32.35% |
| 2 | OH | 26 | 15.29% |
| 3 | IL | 17 | 10.00% |
| 4 | IN | 9 | 5.29% |
| 5 | WI | 3 | 1.76% |
| Totals | 110 | 64.71% |
Lloyd's Midwest:
| Rank | State | # Players | Percentage |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | MI | 183 | 41.22% |
| 2 | OH | 44 | 9.91% |
| 3 | IL | 24 | 5.41% |
| 4 | IN | 19 | 4.28% |
| 5 | WI | 5 | 1.13% |
| 6 | MN | 4 | 0.90% |
| 7 | IA | 1 | 0.23% |
| 8 | NE | 1 | 0.23% |
| Totals | 281 | 63.29% |
Rich Rod's Midwest:
| Rank | State | # Players | Percentage |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | MI | 59 | 46.83% |
| 2 | OH | 14 | 11.11% |
| 3 | IL | 5 | 3.97% |
| 4 | IN | 1 | 0.79% |
| 79 | 62.70% |
Regional and National Footprint
The graphs you see below break down our roster by Region....
I was pretty amazed to see that 82% of Bo's roster was compiled of MidWest kids. I'll update this or do a Part 2......but it will be interesting to see how Hoke's first class will break down once it's complete. Right now its leaning torwards Bo's percentages.
** note: All data was pulled from http://bentley.umich.edu/athdept/football/football.htm
[Ed-M: I used basically the same database for this year's HTTV article on recruiting Ohio, and ran into a similar problem: walk-ons. Bentley doesn't say who's a scholarship player and who isn't. Also the nature of a 4- to 5-year turnover cycle makes it hard to see what effect a coach is having except by tracking trends, not total % of players. For example, Bo's Ohio recruiting had been trending down for a long time in his later years, so that when Moeller took over it looks like the story is Mo recruited nationally and Bo was a Midwest guy. In truth, Bo took over a team from Bump that had been capping at 80% people from a mitten- or trash can-shaped state. Bo started by scouring Ohio but once his program was established he went all around the country. To wit:
If you break that into trend-lines...
...the conclusions are radically different than the percentages above suggest. Also RR and Mo weren't really there long enough to make any judgments, except the first chart shows a pretty radical growth in Ohio prospecting by RR replacing in-state success of Carr.]
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