Who owns the state? Who represents the state? A historical look at the Michigan roster, 1960-2009

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.