physics guy

So Michigan and Penn State knock helmets this coming weekend for the 15h time, with Michigan holding a 10-4 edge in victories.  The two teams did not meet until Penn State's inaugural Big-10 campaign in 1993.  An important off-field meeting occurred, however, in 1968 between officials of the two programs that would set the course of history for the Michigan program.

As is well known, following the retirement of Bump Elliot at the conclusion of the 1968 season, Atheltic Director Don Canham sought a bright young coach from outside the program that could change the stale culture of Michigan and help fill the half-empty Michigan Stadium.  He offfered the job to Joe Paterno.  Paterno was finishing his 14th year at Penn State and third as head coach.  According to Penn State lore, Paterno turned down Canham.  According to Don Canham, Paterno asked if he could think about it until after the bowl season.  Canham replied that he needed a coach right away, thanked Joe, and hired Bo Schembechler.  The rest, as they say, is history.

But what would have happened at Michigan if JoePa had taken the job?  How different would the next 40 years of Michigan football have been?  Would Paterno still be coaching Michigan today?

First, I think that under Paterno the Michigan-Ohio State rivalry would never have reached the fervor and intensity that it did under Bo.  Paterno was an East Coast guy, playing and coaching at Brown before arriving at Penn State.  He was used to rivalries with Boston College, Pittsburgh, and Syracuse.  Certainly the Michigan-OSU rivalry predated Schembechler, but the fact that Bo was Woody's disciple and his chosen successor for the head coaching job at Ohio State moved the rivalry to a higher and much more personal level.  It's hard to imagine that same degree of personal rivalry/hatred would have occurred between Woody and JoePa.

Second, I wonder if Michigan would have had as much success under Paterno.  This is hard to evaluate, because they coached different players and played different teams.  Penn State and Paterno made a living off of beating the likes of Boston College, Syracuse, Pitt, West Virginia, and Maryland.  Penn State played few Big-10 teams prior to joining the league in 1993.  They got pummeled by MSU in 1966, but that was a national championship team.  They beat Iowa five straight times in the 1970's, but also lost to Iowa in 1976, 1978, and 1983;  the 1970's era Hawkeyes were not very good football teams that Michigan beat rather handily.  PSU also lost to Wisconsin in 1970, and OSU in 1976 and 1978. 

Finally, had JoePa experienced the same down period that he did at PSU in 2000-2004 (overall record 26-33) would he had survived at Michigan?  Interesting questions, none of which really matter today but all of which may have been important had Joe given Canham a different answer in 1968.  As a Michigan fan, I can say that, while I am sure JoePa would have been very successful at Michigan, it would be hard to top the last 40 years of the Bo/Mo/Carr/and now Rodriguez eras. And I am very happy that RR is our coach now and hopefully for a long time to come.

Go Blue!  Beat Penn State and JoePa!

We’ve heard a lot on this topic since MD has taken up residence in <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />East Lansing and begun to “ratchet up” MSU’s in-state recruiting effort. MD seems to have landed a few recruits at MSU who may have not even considered the school in previous years.  This has led many Spartan fans to declare that MSU now “owns” the state of Michigan in terms of getting the best and most home-state athletes, and conversely Michigan has given up on recruiting Michigan and having in-state players on the roster.<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

Question: is such rhetoric consistent with the facts?  What does the record actually show?  I thought it would be interesting to go back over the last 50 years and analyze the makeup of the UM football roster. I decided to go back that far because it would give us a good idea of what things were like in the “pre-Bo” days of Bump Elliot.   Fortunately this task is facilitated by the excellent football roster database available on the UM Bentley Historical Library website.  Here you can find rosters for every Michigan team (and I mean every team, dating back to 1879), and where the players went to high school.  Unfortunately, this data includes all players, including walk-ons, and thus doesn’t reflect only recruited players.  However, I thought it still might be instructive to look at how the makeup of the team has changed over the last half-century, and see if there is any evidence of state of Michigan representation falling off in recent years.

Before we begin the analysis, we need to recognize that the size of football rosters has changed over the years, generally becoming smaller as scholarship limitations were imposed.  For instance, Bump Elliot’s 1960 squad had 144 players; Rich Rod’s 2008 squad has 96.  In order to account for this difference, I’ve focused on not the total number of in-state players on the roster, but also what fraction is from the state. 

Results (chart-based!).  I’ve broken down the results into three “eras,” the Bump Elliot Era (1960-68*), the Schembecler Era (1969-2007, including the regimes of Moeller and Carr), and the Rodriguez Era (2008-2009).

Elliot Era:

Schembecler Era:

Rodriguez Era:

Here we see some interesting things.  First there are two large drops in total roster count (column two in these tables): one in 1969, Bo’s first year, and a second in 2008, Rich’s first year.  Obviously this is the well-documented result of attrition with the new regimes.   Bo’s 1969 roster was 113, compared to Bump’s last roster of 144.  Similarly, Rich’s first roster was 96, compared to Carr’s last of 116.  We also see a more gradual decline in the early 1990’s.  This was in response to the imposition of the 85-scholarship limit in 1994.  Overall, it’s pretty clear that Bump’s typical roster was about 140, Bo’s about 120, Carr’s about 110.  Interestingly, in spite of the “small” number of players on Rich’s first team (96), the roster this year is up to 122, equivalent to the biggest roster (122 in 1998) of the entire Bo-Moeller-Carr time span.  Perhaps this reflects Rich’s emphasis on a robust walk-on program?

Now let’s look at column three, the situation regarding Michigan-bred players.  Once again, we have some very interesting results.   Bump had a very steady record of having about 55 % of his players from the state of Michigan.  Things clearly changed dramatically when Bo arrived.  By 1974, only about one-quarter of the roster were Michiganders.  Throughout the Bo-Moeller-Carr years on the average only about 1/3 of the players were from the state of Michigan (the time period of 1976-1978 was a bit anomalous, and I think this is evidence of what was one very strong group of state of Michigan recruits that entered in ’76).  Since about 2001, however, the fraction of state of Michigan players has been rising.  Interestingly, last year’s roster, for Rich’s first year, had the highest fraction of state of Michigan recruits since the pre-Bo years, and this year’s roster has 47% Michigan-bred players.  I think that pretty much blows a big hole in the entire “RR has turned his back on the state” argument.

Now how does this compare to Sparty?  Unfortunately, I could not find database information on historical MSU football rosters.  My suspicion is that they exist only in paper form, archived away in some barn alongside records of state milk production quotas and soy bean yields.  There is roster data for the years 2004 and 2006-2009 on the MSU athletic website (don’t go there!), but that’s the best we can do:

MSU:

The MSU roster for these years averages about 105  or so players, and the fraction of Michigan-bred players varies in the range 46-52%.

 So who represents the state?  I see almost no difference in the representation of state of Michigan players on the rosters of UM and MSU over the last 5 years.  In fact, state representation on the Michigan roster in the Rich Rod era (nascent as it is) is at historically high levels.  If anything, state of Michigan representation on UM’s roster reached its apogee in the early seventies, when Bo was hailed for developing a national program, not disdained for “turning his back on the state.” On the basis of these data, the argument of UM “turning its back on the state” in recent years must be refuted. 

Who owns the state?  Alas, from these data we can’t tell, because that question involves determining who has the highest quality players from the state of Michigan (e.g., based on recruiting rankings).  One piece of evidence: the somewhat wild variation in state representation on the Michigan roster(varying from 25% to 50%) suggests that when higher quality state players were available, Michigan took them.

I’m sure that there’s a lot more that can be discussed and determined from these data and I hope this encourages more discussion. Sorry for any formatting issues here.  I am a bit of an old dog learning new tricks.

*I excluded data for the 1967 roster.  It was inconsistent all other rosters in the Bump Elliot era, and I think that perhaps the Bentley database in incomplete for this year.  Plus leaving it out helps support my argument.