Excellent article on football recruiting in Detroit News
1/3 of players on NFL rosters played HS football in california, florida, or texas
Makes sense since you have suburbs of NYC and Philly in New Jersey. But I never thought about it until someone posted a chart this week that showed where the current NFL players are from. NJ has more NFL players than MI.
And NJ players have represented well in our conference. Ron Dayne came from NJ.
Here's a list from last summer of the top NJ players in the B1G.
so not too far off of general population
Massachusetts is under-represented. Or, more accurate to say, Massachusetts schools are for school.
“I was at one of the high schools (in Dallas) for a camp and the facilities that they have, they had an indoor stadium that some college programs would be envious of and stadiums that cost millions of dollars because (football) is so important to them.” Longtime high school recruiting analyst Tom Lemming drives all 48 states and said in Florida, any “little dink town” makes it a priority to fund the football program no matter how poor it is.
And the "little dink town" wonders why it's so poor.
Football "brings in so much money" for the school. I hear that a lot. Except Northeastern (to name but one example), which has 12k fewer students, founded 80 years later, has nowhere near the name recognition and lives in the shadow of more prestigious schools, has a larger endowment than the University of Alabama. Alabama's is a meager $680 million. For comparison, UM's endowment is $10 billion. Northwestern, also $10 billion. MSU, $2.3 billion. Alabama? $680 million. Hell, Iowa's is over $1 billion. Now, maybe some of that national title money gets funneled back into the general fund, but endowments are generally good for indicating three things: A) how many students you graduate, B) how (financially) successful they are after college, and C) how much they attribute that success to education. Which means for all of being a household name, Alabama is lacking in all three areas.
I'm all for a football program, Hoke/Harbaugh style. As in, if you're here to play football, OK, but you're gonna get your degree. This stuff. . . I don't know whether to seethe or shake my head. I love the game. But in the big scheme of things, it DOES. NOT. MATTER. It's great to have insane passion for the game and 500 satellite camps, but a football-based economy is shit. I love that Harbaugh not only gets it, the players get it too.
When it comes to investing in youngsters, education>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>football.
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sports are almost always a positive influence in kids lives (particularly inner city, etc.) and still realize that a sports/football "based economy" is an example of priorities becoming skewed.
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You ran an inner city program to keep kids OUT of trouble, great. I'm not out to diss on what you do. Run 10, 50, 100 youth football programs. But when it comes to money these towns are oh so short on, you can play football with a pigskin and a patch of dirt. Or a sport that doesn't need pads. Football does not have a monopoly on keeping kids out of trouble; anything that has them running around has the same social benefits. We just happen to like football, and that's cool.
But what happens down in the southeast is on a whole 'nother level. We're talking towns that are happy to let their academics and schools deteriorate to crumbling yet approve a bond for a shiny new stadium. At that point it hardly matters how active the students are because they're gaining nothing in the classroom, and that's at best. Pulling kids out of class to practice. Neglecting anyone who isn't an athlete to keep the athletes eligible. Institutional idolatry of the athletes at the expense of anyone who's academically gifted. Intense, immense pressure to succeed. What's football doing for the kids now?
Call them on it and you'll get the noise about how football "does so much" for the school and community. They're literally trying to turn the high school football program into a cash cow, even though there's zero evidence it works that way. This is not the college level. I only picked on UA because the data was easy to find.
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I agree with this view, there are huge positive effects from sports, but there is a definite debate that can be had in goodwill about whether the scale of resources devoted to sports are worth it and whether one should see public high schools with gleaming athletic facilities.
At the same time Sports are an easy target for people pre-disposed to dislike them and we're probably talking about expenses that amount to a rounding error in a school systems overall budget. So this is likely an argument at the margins of an issue that is easier to focus on and generates a lot of energy because of the passions of both people who enjoy sports and those who dislike sports.
Like I said, I'm all for kids playing football. Kids should be out doing stuff. I went full hyperbole with "500 satellite camps" in my endorsement but that apparently wasn't obvious enough. But way to miss all that because you're wired to take offense.
It's one thing to encourage kids to be active (though it doesn't have to be football -- you're kind of screwing over the kids who don't like sports at that point); it's another to turn them into a money machine. Football economy is stupid. And the numbers are overwhelming. Ridiculously overwhelming. Active kids do better than idle kids, yes. But collectively, turning kids into football players over turning them into students who happen to play football is a horrible, horrible investment.
Which is not only backed up by reams of not-even-close data, but it's just simple common sense. For all the money Alabama pours into football, a whopping 65 of them are pros. That's impressive in a relative context, but as a jobs program that's an atrocious RoI. NFL rosters are fixed in size and there are only so many coaching jobs out there. While individually they make less money, there are probably some offices in Huntsville with more engineers than that, but many of them come from out of state.
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on this site a few days ago?
Great quote from Curtis Blackwell of MSU:
"“We try to get a lot of top players from the South, but we just have not had a lot of success getting those guys to visit our campus."
Funny: Michigan doesn't have that problem.
Right? And UM hasn't had that problem since forever.
I also liked Blackwell's reasons to stay close to home - "...if we only have one day off, we can get on a plane to California..." UM doesn't have that problem, either. So I really don't know what his points were? 'We don't have time to recruit the hotbeds for the best talent, so we just stay close to home'. Okay...
It was a decently researched story, but stayed on a generically high level. For instance, they didn't point out that UM's efforts are resulting in getting the top end of 'hotbed' recruits, whereas MSU's efforts are resulting in middling level recruits from those areas.
I really think the biggest difference is coaching. Harbaugh brings boatloads of NFL street cred, and digging deeper reveals even more success. And he's alive - he's interesting, dynamic, and not afraid to try something new. Mork Dintonio has disrespkt, and digging deeper doesn't reveal anywhere near the level of success Harbaugh has. He's a good coach, no doubt, but he doesn't illicit the same excitement level that Harbaugh does. Not by a mile...