Demographics and the Decline of the Big Ten

The New York Times highlights how the Big Ten's  poor performance in recent decades has hurt member schools' recruiting efforts in their own states:

Depending on whom you ask, Jerome Baker, a senior at Benedictine High School here, is either the highest- or the second-highest-rated football prospect in Ohio from the class of 2015. He is a four-star linebacker, appraised from 36th to 72nd nationally....

Almost every pundit predicted Baker, 17, would become a Buckeye. But this summer, when he made his oral commitment, he said, referring to his team’s mascot, “This Bengal, next fall, will be a future Gator,” and slipped on a Florida visor.

Baker is both a symptom and a cause of an undeniable fact of the sport’s landscape: The Big Ten is not what it used to be.

Through the first five weeks of the season, Big Ten teams are 6-11 against the other major conferences and 4-9 against out-of-conference teams in ESPN’s Football Power Index top 50. Indiana lost to Bowling Green. Minnesota was crushed by Texas Christian. Michigan was roundly defeated by Utah at home in a game that the Wolverines paid the Utes $1 million to play.

Big Ten teams won only one title during the 16-year Bowl Championship Series era (Ohio State 2002) and have captured only one other national title since 1971 (Michigan 1997). Penn State won two titles and Nebraska won three titles in the past four decades, before joining the conference. The Big Ten’s relative decline could be further exposed this season because the College Football Playoff will feature only four teams, meaning at least one major conference will be left out. If the season ended this week, and the playoff were determined by The Associated Press poll, the Big Ten would be the only major conference without a representative.

While all that is depressing, the real story, as I've highlighted before, is demographics:

Probably the Big Ten’s biggest obstacle is that its members’ states do not produce top football players the way they used to. It is no coincidence that the Big Ten had postwar glory years, when the Midwest thrived on the back of the auto industry. The Rust Belt and the decline of Big Ten football are not unrelated.

Today, Texas and Florida each produce more than twice as many Division I football players as Ohio does, per Scout. com. In the last three classes, according to ESPN, the Big Ten’s 11 states produced six five-star recruits. Florida alone produced 11.

Josh Helmholdt, who covers Midwest recruiting for Rivals.com, said: “I always hear that a four-star in the Midwest is not as good as a four-star in Florida. That’s wrong. They’re every bit as good. The Midwest just doesn’t have enough of them.”

An instructive comparison is Michigan and Georgia. In 1960, Michigan had twice Georgia’s population; in 1990, it was nearly one and a half times as big; today, their populations are roughly equivalent. Over the past eight years, according to Scout.com, Georgia has averaged 169.3 recruits per year to Michigan’s 64.1. In the last three N.F.L. drafts, 51 players from Georgia were selected, while only 16 from Michigan were. (In the first rounds of those drafts, the SEC had 33 players selected; the Big Ten nine.)
“Can the Big Ten compete?” Mike Farrell, Rivals’ national recruiting director, wrote recently. “My simple answer is this: only if it recruits in the Southeast.”

The problem is, just like when it comes to keeping retirees in the Rust Belt, the weather really works against us.  Add to that the fact that the SEC is so dominant, and it is going to be really hard for the Big Ten to compete for athletes in the Midwest, let alone in the southeast.  Urban Meyer has done ok at it, but the end of the season last year again highlighted how overrated and underchallenged the Buckeyes were all season.  What good does it do to dominate the Big Ten when the Big Ten sucks?  The difficulty for the Big Ten reflects the difficulty Rust Belt cities have stemming brain drain.  Demographics make things very tough.