http://www.pennlive.com/sports/index.ssf/2015/08/maryland_and_rutgers_skeptics.html
Maryland and Rutgers skeptics ignore recruiting trends; entire Big Ten mines DMV and NJ
Population trends sometimes happen so slowly we don't notice. But college football coaches see them before anyone. They understand the job prospects and migrations of the locals because they are around every year, seeing the school enrollments, talking to the parents.
What's clear to anyone paying attention is that healthy economies bear abundant caches of college-ready athletes. Right now, that means the suburban areas in stable tech and service industries. The areas that were able to diversify and retain their populations during the emigration of America's heavy industry and manufacturing to Asia in the 1970s and '80s have continued to churn out talent.
The I-95 corridor has included all types of business. So, while certain more industrial areas have faltered some, other tech-heavy pockets have taken their places.
That's not quite as true with many semirural Midwestern and western Pennsylvania river burgs that thrived a few decades ago while depending on two or three businesses that subsequently moved their jobs overseas.
They're in pain now and their segmented populations are hemorrhaging. The old heavy industrial regions that used to run out football stars like assembly lines are being drained of youth.
None of these trends are breaking news; they've been evolving for four decades. But I've never seen such demographic data distilled so succinctly in one graphic as in Dave Bartoo's recruiting "heat map" for the Big Ten, available at his fascinating CFBMatrix.com website.
What the heat map shows most stunningly is how fertile for all Big Ten schools, not just the Eastern outposts of Penn State, Rutgers and Maryland, are the metro areas along the I-95 corridor. This is especially true when those areas are compared to the traditional hot Midwestern recruiting grounds around the Great Lakes population centers. It's really pretty amazing.
This only reinforces my belief that Jim Delany's expansion to RU and UMd, so disparaged and mocked by so many in the Midwest, will be validated sooner or later. It's inevitable. In fact, I'll predict that, within a decade, Rutgers and Maryland will be established as more important to the Big Ten than longtime football powerhouses Nebraska and Wisconsin.
More on the recruiting graphic in a moment but first a little data on the Knights and Terps, again based on handy recruiting-rank analytics provided by CFBMatrix..com:
Bartoo averages the rankings of the three most respected services – Scout, Rivals and 24/7 – to arrive at his annual national rankings. The evidence clearly shows that success breeds success at Rutgers and Maryland as well as anyplace else. The problem has been sustaining it. It's not easy to turn around a barge and generate enough positive momentum so that it remains pointed in the right direction.
The only Big Ten program that's been able to turn from chronic loser to habitual winner in the last 30 years is Wisconsin. Thanks to AD Barry Alvarez and his predecessor Pat Richter, UW has been able to instill a stable regime and two decades of abundance (1993-2012) after three previous decades of famine (1963-1992). The Badgers are the template every struggling program struggles to emulate.
Much more often at such places, miracle-worker coaches arrive and, once they string together some success, quickly evacuate for a better situation or simply cannot withstand the annual stress of maintaining an outpost lacking tradition.
Consider the brief spikes of high performance under Greg Schiano at Rutgers (2005-11) and Ralph Friedgen at Maryland (2001-06) and how those periods affected recruiting.
Partly using the recruiting of predecessor Ron Vanderlinden, Friedgen stepped in and assembled three straight double-digit-win seasons and upper-tier bowl appearances (2001-03), two of them blowout wins over BCS conference opponents after the 2002 and 2003 seasons.
Not coincidentally, in 2004, 2005 and 2006 Maryland enjoyed its best recruiting hauls since rankings were initiated – three straight top-30 national classes (Nos. 16, 21 and 27, respectively).
But Friedgen, aging, not in the greatest of health and increasingly at odds with athletics director Debbie Yow, could not sustain the roll. He was removed in 2010 by current AD Kevin Anderson and the Terrapins have not recruited anywhere near that well before his arrival or since.
"If Maryland could get their [bleep] together, they could be absolutely outstanding; they have top-25 potential," said Bartoo, a college football analytics specialist from Portland, Ore. He did not agree with Friedgen's firing and sees the Terrapins as adrift now:
"They have the potential to be a contender in that Big Ten East division if they get the right coach and buy-in from all the critical areas – athletics department, administration, coaches."
Rutgers was nothing less than college football's radioactive wasteland when Schiano arrived in 2001. It took four years of hard labor but the former Penn State assistant eventually lifted the Scarlet Knights to 7-5 in 2005 and then 11-2 in a memorable 2006 that included a No. 12 Associated Press poll ranking at season's end. In 2007, RU enjoyed its best recruiting class ever, ranked No. 30 nationally.
After four 8- and 9-win seasons over a 5-year span, RU assembled the No. 32 and 25 ranked classes nationally in 2011 and 2012, beating out Penn State in both years. Had the Knights been a Big Ten member, the '12 class would have ranked third in the conference behind only Ohio State and Michigan.
But Schiano's departure for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers a week before 2012 Signing Day unplugged that recruiting momentum and it has not been recaptured.
These cases suggest Maryland and Rutgers can be cultivated if a long-term head coach with the chops to recruit and the will to stick around can be attracted. Little evidence exists that current HCs Randy Edsall and Kyle Flood are those guys. But if and when the right men arrive, the recruiting turf exists to nourish both programs.
Bartoo's heat map shows that. Those who disparage Delany's initiative to expand east may ignore all the cable revenue and alumni numbers if they wish and simply focus on the geography of high school talent.
A glance at the recruiting map shows the single most fertile metro area for Big Ten rosters in 2014 was not Chicago or Detroit or Cleveland but DC/Baltimore. A close third to runner-up Chicagoland was Philadelphia/South Jersey. And right there in the mix is NYC/North Jersey.
Something else to note from that map: The western PA veins once mined by everyone from Joe Paterno to Woody Hayes to Bear Bryant haven't totally dried up but they aren't pumping out what they used to. Pittsburgh metro and the surrounding coal and mineral and steel towns now account for less Big Ten roster talent than metro Indianapolis or Columbus or Cincinnati/Dayton.
That's simply a matter of census math. For instance, Beaver County -- the place that germinated Mike Ditka, Joe Namath and Tony Dorsett -- had 210,000 residents in 1970; it now has 169,000 and is still declining.
Not true of all the suburbs in southern Maryland and northern Virginia, full of thriving service industries in financial, consulting, healthcare and technology sectors. So saturated are the communities closest to the Beltway that now more distant Stafford and Winchester counties in Virginia and Frederick County in Maryland are burgeoning. All are expected to keep growing.
"That DC-Maryland-Virginia area [known to college coaches as The DMV] is critical for the entire Big Ten, especially Penn State, in terms of keeping up with the rest of the nation," said Bartoo. "It's an area of strength that the Big Ten needs to control in order to keep up with the SEC, the ACC and the Pac-12. That is a top-three recruiting area in the Big Ten without a question."
Penn State fans would not be surprised at this; Vanderlinden and Larry Johnson threw out their nets in these areas and reeled them in for a decade at PSU. James Franklin's staff is doing it now.
But the conference's traditional Midwestern fans might be stunned at just how important the East is to the lifeblood of everybody in the league. That includes schools amid the Great Lakes and Great Plains hundreds of miles away.
Maryland and Rutgers skeptics ignore recruiting trends; entire Big Ten mines DMV and NJ
Population trends sometimes happen so slowly we don't notice. But college football coaches see them before anyone. They understand the job prospects and migrations of the locals because they are around every year, seeing the school enrollments, talking to the parents.
What's clear to anyone paying attention is that healthy economies bear abundant caches of college-ready athletes. Right now, that means the suburban areas in stable tech and service industries. The areas that were able to diversify and retain their populations during the emigration of America's heavy industry and manufacturing to Asia in the 1970s and '80s have continued to churn out talent.
The I-95 corridor has included all types of business. So, while certain more industrial areas have faltered some, other tech-heavy pockets have taken their places.
That's not quite as true with many semirural Midwestern and western Pennsylvania river burgs that thrived a few decades ago while depending on two or three businesses that subsequently moved their jobs overseas.
They're in pain now and their segmented populations are hemorrhaging. The old heavy industrial regions that used to run out football stars like assembly lines are being drained of youth.
None of these trends are breaking news; they've been evolving for four decades. But I've never seen such demographic data distilled so succinctly in one graphic as in Dave Bartoo's recruiting "heat map" for the Big Ten, available at his fascinating CFBMatrix.com website.
What the heat map shows most stunningly is how fertile for all Big Ten schools, not just the Eastern outposts of Penn State, Rutgers and Maryland, are the metro areas along the I-95 corridor. This is especially true when those areas are compared to the traditional hot Midwestern recruiting grounds around the Great Lakes population centers. It's really pretty amazing.
This only reinforces my belief that Jim Delany's expansion to RU and UMd, so disparaged and mocked by so many in the Midwest, will be validated sooner or later. It's inevitable. In fact, I'll predict that, within a decade, Rutgers and Maryland will be established as more important to the Big Ten than longtime football powerhouses Nebraska and Wisconsin.
More on the recruiting graphic in a moment but first a little data on the Knights and Terps, again based on handy recruiting-rank analytics provided by CFBMatrix..com:
Bartoo averages the rankings of the three most respected services – Scout, Rivals and 24/7 – to arrive at his annual national rankings. The evidence clearly shows that success breeds success at Rutgers and Maryland as well as anyplace else. The problem has been sustaining it. It's not easy to turn around a barge and generate enough positive momentum so that it remains pointed in the right direction.
The only Big Ten program that's been able to turn from chronic loser to habitual winner in the last 30 years is Wisconsin. Thanks to AD Barry Alvarez and his predecessor Pat Richter, UW has been able to instill a stable regime and two decades of abundance (1993-2012) after three previous decades of famine (1963-1992). The Badgers are the template every struggling program struggles to emulate.
Much more often at such places, miracle-worker coaches arrive and, once they string together some success, quickly evacuate for a better situation or simply cannot withstand the annual stress of maintaining an outpost lacking tradition.
Consider the brief spikes of high performance under Greg Schiano at Rutgers (2005-11) and Ralph Friedgen at Maryland (2001-06) and how those periods affected recruiting.
Partly using the recruiting of predecessor Ron Vanderlinden, Friedgen stepped in and assembled three straight double-digit-win seasons and upper-tier bowl appearances (2001-03), two of them blowout wins over BCS conference opponents after the 2002 and 2003 seasons.
Not coincidentally, in 2004, 2005 and 2006 Maryland enjoyed its best recruiting hauls since rankings were initiated – three straight top-30 national classes (Nos. 16, 21 and 27, respectively).
But Friedgen, aging, not in the greatest of health and increasingly at odds with athletics director Debbie Yow, could not sustain the roll. He was removed in 2010 by current AD Kevin Anderson and the Terrapins have not recruited anywhere near that well before his arrival or since.
"If Maryland could get their [bleep] together, they could be absolutely outstanding; they have top-25 potential," said Bartoo, a college football analytics specialist from Portland, Ore. He did not agree with Friedgen's firing and sees the Terrapins as adrift now:
"They have the potential to be a contender in that Big Ten East division if they get the right coach and buy-in from all the critical areas – athletics department, administration, coaches."
Rutgers was nothing less than college football's radioactive wasteland when Schiano arrived in 2001. It took four years of hard labor but the former Penn State assistant eventually lifted the Scarlet Knights to 7-5 in 2005 and then 11-2 in a memorable 2006 that included a No. 12 Associated Press poll ranking at season's end. In 2007, RU enjoyed its best recruiting class ever, ranked No. 30 nationally.
After four 8- and 9-win seasons over a 5-year span, RU assembled the No. 32 and 25 ranked classes nationally in 2011 and 2012, beating out Penn State in both years. Had the Knights been a Big Ten member, the '12 class would have ranked third in the conference behind only Ohio State and Michigan.
But Schiano's departure for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers a week before 2012 Signing Day unplugged that recruiting momentum and it has not been recaptured.
These cases suggest Maryland and Rutgers can be cultivated if a long-term head coach with the chops to recruit and the will to stick around can be attracted. Little evidence exists that current HCs Randy Edsall and Kyle Flood are those guys. But if and when the right men arrive, the recruiting turf exists to nourish both programs.
Bartoo's heat map shows that. Those who disparage Delany's initiative to expand east may ignore all the cable revenue and alumni numbers if they wish and simply focus on the geography of high school talent.
A glance at the recruiting map shows the single most fertile metro area for Big Ten rosters in 2014 was not Chicago or Detroit or Cleveland but DC/Baltimore. A close third to runner-up Chicagoland was Philadelphia/South Jersey. And right there in the mix is NYC/North Jersey.
Something else to note from that map: The western PA veins once mined by everyone from Joe Paterno to Woody Hayes to Bear Bryant haven't totally dried up but they aren't pumping out what they used to. Pittsburgh metro and the surrounding coal and mineral and steel towns now account for less Big Ten roster talent than metro Indianapolis or Columbus or Cincinnati/Dayton.
That's simply a matter of census math. For instance, Beaver County -- the place that germinated Mike Ditka, Joe Namath and Tony Dorsett -- had 210,000 residents in 1970; it now has 169,000 and is still declining.
Not true of all the suburbs in southern Maryland and northern Virginia, full of thriving service industries in financial, consulting, healthcare and technology sectors. So saturated are the communities closest to the Beltway that now more distant Stafford and Winchester counties in Virginia and Frederick County in Maryland are burgeoning. All are expected to keep growing.
"That DC-Maryland-Virginia area [known to college coaches as The DMV] is critical for the entire Big Ten, especially Penn State, in terms of keeping up with the rest of the nation," said Bartoo. "It's an area of strength that the Big Ten needs to control in order to keep up with the SEC, the ACC and the Pac-12. That is a top-three recruiting area in the Big Ten without a question."
Penn State fans would not be surprised at this; Vanderlinden and Larry Johnson threw out their nets in these areas and reeled them in for a decade at PSU. James Franklin's staff is doing it now.
But the conference's traditional Midwestern fans might be stunned at just how important the East is to the lifeblood of everybody in the league. That includes schools amid the Great Lakes and Great Plains hundreds of miles away.