NEW YORK

The first college-football game was played 139 years ago in New Jersey, between Rutgers and Princeton, and the sport was dominated by Northeastern schools such as Yale and Harvard in its infancy.

By the middle of the last century, the South had risen in college football, and these days there's no question: If you want to win a national championship, it's best to play in places where sunscreen is more important than snow boots, and the grits are better than the bagels.

Why? Simple.

Because that's where the best players are.

Since the Bowl Championship Series started crowning national champions in 1998, Ohio State and Oklahoma are the only schools that play in cold weather to have won championships. And it's important to point out that Oklahoma borders Texas, which has more high-school football players than any other state.

"You could draw parallel lines from Houston to Jacksonville and from Dallas to Atlanta, in between I-20 and I-10, and there would be as many football players in that area as in any other area in the country," said Bobby Burton, the editor-in-chief of Rivals.com, who has covered recruiting for 15 years.

Part of this trend is about pure numbers.

There are a lot of people living in the part of the country known as the Sun Belt, especially in Florida with its population of a little more than 18 million. More people, more players.

But the numbers don't fully explain the imbalance.

The weather plays a big part -- there's no brutal cold and snow to keep kids from getting outside and playing ball. When it comes time to pick a college, it's not easy to persuade a teenager who has never owned a pair of gloves to sign up for three months of wearing long johns.

Also, the rules governing high-school football in the South give players far more opportunities to hone their craft. For most top players in the South, football is a year-round sport.

Yet there's something deeper at work here.

"There's one simple answer," Burton said, "it's just a different social mentality (in the South)."

King football rules.

It's an integral part of Southern culture, and it's just not the same throughout much of the northern United States, especially the Northeast.

In the South, small towns pretty much shut down on Friday nights when the high school kicks off as thousands pack their local stadiums.

Saturday morning, it's time to pack up the car and head off to the college game, barbecue in tow. The kids who played the night before watch the teams they've been dreaming about becoming part of since they could tell the difference between a Vol and a Gator, an Aggie and a Longhorn.

Then on Sunday, they'll flip on the NFL games, often just to root on their local hometown heroes.

Hattiesburg, Miss., has lots of Green Bay Packers fans -- many of whom just became New York Jets fans -- because of Brett Favre, a former Southern Miss quarterback.

"In most of the rest of the world, college football is a game and they love it. In the South, it's not a game, it's a way of life," said Tony Barnhart, s longtime Atlanta Journal-Constitution sports writer and author of Southern Fried Football.

"It's built into the DNA like no other place in the world."

Sure, there are places up north where the residents follow the same routine -- Massillon, Ohio, comes to mind. But longtime recruiting analyst Tom Lemming of the CBS College Sports Network has been to far more games in the Northeast and Midwest where "you're lucky to find 20 people in the stands."

The results of all that Southern football madness are easy to spot in the list of Rivals' top 100 prospects.

In the recruiting class of 2008, 42 of Rivals' top 100 were from the 11 states below the Mason-Dixon line, starting with Virginia in the east and sweeping west to Arkansas. Another 15 were from Texas. California, the most populous state in the country, had 13.

The other 37 states produced 30.

New York state has more people than Florida, but the Sunshine State produces enough top-tier talent to be the backbone of three teams (Florida, Florida State and Miami) that have won a total of eight national titles since 1980, while still leaving plenty of players to bolster rosters all over the country.

On the other hand, not one of Rivals' top 100 in 2008 was from New York state. There was one on the 2007 list -- quarterback Mike Paulus from Syracuse, who went to North Carolina.

New York City is the biggest culprit. All those Big East and Big Ten teams are getting no help from the Big Apple.

"The biggest city in the country is not producing football players," Lemming said.

With its population headed toward 9 million, New York City has had one player break into the Rivals annual 100 since 2003 -- Maurice Evans, a defensive lineman from Queens who is now playing for Penn State.

"New York and Philadelphia, the two largest cities on the East Coast, have been perennial basketball hotbeds," Burton said.

Football just isn't a priority in New York.

The city's Public School Athletic League, has 217 member schools. Only 49 play football, according to the organization. Most of the games are played on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. So much for Friday night lights.

The difference between the importance of football in the Deep South and the Northeast can be found in other places.

Massachusetts, a state of 6.4 million, had 325 high schools and 22,169 students playing football, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations' 2006-07 stats.

By comparison, Alabama, with a population of about 4.6 million, had 374 high schools playing football and 21,590 players, according to NFSHSA stats.

Coach Dave Wannstedt of Pittsburgh and Coach Greg Schiano of Rutgers, who both worked at the University of Miami before becoming head coaches in their home states, said that weather and repetition make for better-developed players coming from the South.

"The weather gives them a chance to be practicing, be involved with football pretty much year round," Wannstedt said. "I think that helps. You don't see the basketball, and some of those things, hockey, as prevalent down South as you do in the Northeast."

The mild climate also helps keep much of that Southern talent close to home.

Brouce Mompremier, a linebacker at the University of South Florida in Tampa, played high school ball in Miami. He wasn't on the Hurricanes' radar, but Kansas recruited him hard.

"How am I going to survive there? I've never seen snow. I've never experienced a cold, cold winter," he said. "It was like, ‘Kansas, South Florida. Kansas, South Florida.' South Florida's up and coming. I was like, ‘I'm staying here.' That was a no-brainer."

With schools such as South Florida, Central Florida, Florida Atlantic and Florida International in the Sunshine State and UAB and Troy in Alabama joining major college football, players such as Mompremier, who 15 years ago would've been forced to migrate north to find a scholarship, can remain parka-free and play big-time football.

"A lot of Florida guys don't want to go up north with all that cold weather," said Mompremier's teammate Ben Williams, a running back from Lake Wales, just south of Lakeland in central Florida. "With all the schools being down here now, I think it does make it harder for those out of state schools to come down here and pull guys out."

Even more important than the weather, Schiano and Wannstedt said, is spring football practice, which is a given throughout the South and Texas and hardly exists in the North.

"You look at a high school kid in Florida, for instance, they get 20 spring practices," Schiano said. "That's 60 practices that a young man would have in his high school career that a young man up here doesn't have."

Add to that, Schiano said, the benefit of simply staying in football mode throughout the offseason.

"Knowing that that's going to happen (spring practice), what does that do to the guys getting ready for it in the spring opposed to getting ready for it only in August?" he said.

On top of all that, 7-on-7 summer football camps and tournaments -- featuring only skill position players and no pads or tackling -- have become all the rage throughout the Deep South and Texas. Burton said 7-on-7 is catching on in Pennsylvania, Ohio (the two most fertile northern states for top high school football players) and Illinois, but it doesn't exist in many northern states.

So, holding a few 7-on-7 camps over the summer wouldn't hurt all those Big Ten and Big East schools up North.

Neither would opening a satellite campus on the shores of Lake Okeechobee.

http://www2.journalnow.com/content/2008/...sp/?sports

Quote:Then on Sunday, they'll flip on the NFL games, often just to root on their local hometown heroes.

Hattiesburg, Miss., has lots of Green Bay Packers fans -- many of whom just became New York Jets fans -- because of Brett Favre, a former Southern Miss quarterback.

This is quite true in a few TV markets. There are pockets of the country who don't always get a regional NFL game of interest, but get a game because of the hometown college kid. I remember seeing NFL distribution maps where Huntington-Charleston, WV would get Jaguars or Jets games because of Byron Leftwich & Chad Pennington and Fresno, CA would get Texans games because of David Carr.

High school football kicked off here in east Tennessee last night. The newspapers were dominated by coverage of the games.

High schools down here get better coverage than The BEast does anywhere...

I also think a big part of college football being better in the south.. is tons of players given the chance want to go to where its warm.. that makes it easier for southern schools to cherry pick the north for talent while the northern schools go into fla and tex and take whats left over by the big boys from the south. besides girls in shorts in winter are cuter than girls in heavy pants and overcoats..

goodknightfl Wrote:I also think a big part of college football being better in the south.. is tons of players given the chance want to go to where its warm.. that makes it easier for southern schools to cherry pick the north for talent while the northern schools go into fla and tex and take whats left over by the big boys from the south. besides girls in shorts in winter are cuter than girls in heavy pants and overcoats..

Good call goodknight, there's really no comparison between females lightly clothed vs. heavily clothed.

BTW, the article said UM, FSU & UF had won 8 NC's since 1980 ... isn't it 9?

bitcruncher Wrote:High school football kicked off here in east Tennessee last night. The newspapers were dominated by coverage of the games.

High schools down here get better coverage than The BEast does anywhere...

This Friday coming in Louisville.

SO#1 Wrote:NEW YORK

The first college-football game was played 139 years ago in New Jersey, between Rutgers and Princeton, and the sport was dominated by Northeastern schools such as Yale and Harvard in its infancy.

By the middle of the last century, the South had risen in college football, and these days there's no question: If you want to win a national championship, it's best to play in places where sunscreen is more important than snow boots, and the grits are better than the bagels.

Why? Simple.

Because that's where the best players are.

Since the Bowl Championship Series started crowning national champions in 1998, Ohio State and Oklahoma are the only schools that play in cold weather to have won championships. And it's important to point out that Oklahoma borders Texas, which has more high-school football players than any other state.

"You could draw parallel lines from Houston to Jacksonville and from Dallas to Atlanta, in between I-20 and I-10, and there would be as many football players in that area as in any other area in the country," said Bobby Burton, the editor-in-chief of Rivals.com, who has covered recruiting for 15 years.

Part of this trend is about pure numbers.

There are a lot of people living in the part of the country known as the Sun Belt, especially in Florida with its population of a little more than 18 million. More people, more players.

But the numbers don't fully explain the imbalance.

The weather plays a big part -- there's no brutal cold and snow to keep kids from getting outside and playing ball. When it comes time to pick a college, it's not easy to persuade a teenager who has never owned a pair of gloves to sign up for three months of wearing long johns.

Also, the rules governing high-school football in the South give players far more opportunities to hone their craft. For most top players in the South, football is a year-round sport.

Yet there's something deeper at work here.

"There's one simple answer," Burton said, "it's just a different social mentality (in the South)."

King football rules.

It's an integral part of Southern culture, and it's just not the same throughout much of the northern United States, especially the Northeast.

In the South, small towns pretty much shut down on Friday nights when the high school kicks off as thousands pack their local stadiums.

Saturday morning, it's time to pack up the car and head off to the college game, barbecue in tow. The kids who played the night before watch the teams they've been dreaming about becoming part of since they could tell the difference between a Vol and a Gator, an Aggie and a Longhorn.

Then on Sunday, they'll flip on the NFL games, often just to root on their local hometown heroes.

Hattiesburg, Miss., has lots of Green Bay Packers fans -- many of whom just became New York Jets fans -- because of Brett Favre, a former Southern Miss quarterback.

"In most of the rest of the world, college football is a game and they love it. In the South, it's not a game, it's a way of life," said Tony Barnhart, s longtime Atlanta Journal-Constitution sports writer and author of Southern Fried Football.

"It's built into the DNA like no other place in the world."

Sure, there are places up north where the residents follow the same routine -- Massillon, Ohio, comes to mind. But longtime recruiting analyst Tom Lemming of the CBS College Sports Network has been to far more games in the Northeast and Midwest where "you're lucky to find 20 people in the stands."

The results of all that Southern football madness are easy to spot in the list of Rivals' top 100 prospects.

In the recruiting class of 2008, 42 of Rivals' top 100 were from the 11 states below the Mason-Dixon line, starting with Virginia in the east and sweeping west to Arkansas. Another 15 were from Texas. California, the most populous state in the country, had 13.

The other 37 states produced 30.

New York state has more people than Florida, but the Sunshine State produces enough top-tier talent to be the backbone of three teams (Florida, Florida State and Miami) that have won a total of eight national titles since 1980, while still leaving plenty of players to bolster rosters all over the country.

On the other hand, not one of Rivals' top 100 in 2008 was from New York state. There was one on the 2007 list -- quarterback Mike Paulus from Syracuse, who went to North Carolina.

New York City is the biggest culprit. All those Big East and Big Ten teams are getting no help from the Big Apple.

"The biggest city in the country is not producing football players," Lemming said.

With its population headed toward 9 million, New York City has had one player break into the Rivals annual 100 since 2003 -- Maurice Evans, a defensive lineman from Queens who is now playing for Penn State.

"New York and Philadelphia, the two largest cities on the East Coast, have been perennial basketball hotbeds," Burton said.

Football just isn't a priority in New York.

The city's Public School Athletic League, has 217 member schools. Only 49 play football, according to the organization. Most of the games are played on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. So much for Friday night lights.

The difference between the importance of football in the Deep South and the Northeast can be found in other places.

Massachusetts, a state of 6.4 million, had 325 high schools and 22,169 students playing football, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations' 2006-07 stats.

By comparison, Alabama, with a population of about 4.6 million, had 374 high schools playing football and 21,590 players, according to NFSHSA stats.

Coach Dave Wannstedt of Pittsburgh and Coach Greg Schiano of Rutgers, who both worked at the University of Miami before becoming head coaches in their home states, said that weather and repetition make for better-developed players coming from the South.

"The weather gives them a chance to be practicing, be involved with football pretty much year round," Wannstedt said. "I think that helps. You don't see the basketball, and some of those things, hockey, as prevalent down South as you do in the Northeast."

The mild climate also helps keep much of that Southern talent close to home.

Brouce Mompremier, a linebacker at the University of South Florida in Tampa, played high school ball in Miami. He wasn't on the Hurricanes' radar, but Kansas recruited him hard.

"How am I going to survive there? I've never seen snow. I've never experienced a cold, cold winter," he said. "It was like, ‘Kansas, South Florida. Kansas, South Florida.' South Florida's up and coming. I was like, ‘I'm staying here.' That was a no-brainer."

With schools such as South Florida, Central Florida, Florida Atlantic and Florida International in the Sunshine State and UAB and Troy in Alabama joining major college football, players such as Mompremier, who 15 years ago would've been forced to migrate north to find a scholarship, can remain parka-free and play big-time football.

"A lot of Florida guys don't want to go up north with all that cold weather," said Mompremier's teammate Ben Williams, a running back from Lake Wales, just south of Lakeland in central Florida. "With all the schools being down here now, I think it does make it harder for those out of state schools to come down here and pull guys out."

Even more important than the weather, Schiano and Wannstedt said, is spring football practice, which is a given throughout the South and Texas and hardly exists in the North.

"You look at a high school kid in Florida, for instance, they get 20 spring practices," Schiano said. "That's 60 practices that a young man would have in his high school career that a young man up here doesn't have."

Add to that, Schiano said, the benefit of simply staying in football mode throughout the offseason.

"Knowing that that's going to happen (spring practice), what does that do to the guys getting ready for it in the spring opposed to getting ready for it only in August?" he said.

On top of all that, 7-on-7 summer football camps and tournaments -- featuring only skill position players and no pads or tackling -- have become all the rage throughout the Deep South and Texas. Burton said 7-on-7 is catching on in Pennsylvania, Ohio (the two most fertile northern states for top high school football players) and Illinois, but it doesn't exist in many northern states.

So, holding a few 7-on-7 camps over the summer wouldn't hurt all those Big Ten and Big East schools up North.

Neither would opening a satellite campus on the shores of Lake Okeechobee.

http://www2.journalnow.com/content/2008/...sp/?sports

This is why adding Memphis, East Carolina, Central Florida and South Miss would make the current Big East football a great all-sports conference!

USM is a stretch, Wilkie. It would be better to leave a couple slots in case we can attract a former eastern foe to come onboard.

Anyone leaving does so by hari-kiri (eliminates athletics)...

Wilkie01 Wrote:

bitcruncher Wrote:High school football kicked off here in east Tennessee last night. The newspapers were dominated by coverage of the games.

High schools down here get better coverage than The BEast does anywhere...

This Friday coming in Louisville.

I'd like to give a shout out (not that I exactly know what that means) to Male High, St. X, Trinity High, and Christian Academy of Louisville!

Maryville, TN, last year's unofficial HS national champ, lost their first game, and their record setting QB, to Seymour. Ouch. What a way to start the season...

Yes, this article is the perfect example of why Memphis, ECU and UCF should be added to the BEast. However, this same article explains why those sentiments are lost words to people who live above the Mason Dixon line. They just don't get it.

Yankees... go figure...

army56mike Wrote:Yes, this article is the perfect example of why Memphis, ECU and UCF should be added to the BEast. However, this same article explains why those sentiments are lost words to people who live above the Mason Dixon line. They just don't get it.

That certainly is one way to look at it.

However, keep in mind that one of the Big East's greatest assets to the BCS system is to help increase college football viewing in the northeastern markets. Those markets are still basically untapped.

Let's see what happens over the next four or five years. It's not as though Memphis, ECU, or UCF are likely to go anywhere in that time frame.

Cheers,
Neil

I thought everybody had 7on7. not to sound like a jerk.

Louisville does.

army56mike Wrote:Yes, this article is the perfect example of why Memphis, ECU and UCF should be added to the BEast. However, this same article explains why those sentiments are lost words to people who live above the Mason Dixon line. They just don't get it.

Well...some folks that live above the Mason Dixon line DO GET IT but yes they might be in the minority.

Crimsonelf Wrote:

goodknightfl Wrote:I also think a big part of college football being better in the south.. is tons of players given the chance want to go to where its warm.. that makes it easier for southern schools to cherry pick the north for talent while the northern schools go into fla and tex and take whats left over by the big boys from the south. besides girls in shorts in winter are cuter than girls in heavy pants and overcoats..

Good call goodknight, there's really no comparison between females lightly clothed vs. heavily clothed.

BTW, the article said UM, FSU & UF had won 8 NC's since 1980 ... isn't it 9?

The best day of the year is the first warm day of spring/winter when the shorts come out.

firmbizzle Wrote:

Crimsonelf Wrote:

goodknightfl Wrote:I also think a big part of college football being better in the south.. is tons of players given the chance want to go to where its warm.. that makes it easier for southern schools to cherry pick the north for talent while the northern schools go into fla and tex and take whats left over by the big boys from the south. besides girls in shorts in winter are cuter than girls in heavy pants and overcoats..

Good call goodknight, there's really no comparison between females lightly clothed vs. heavily clothed.

BTW, the article said UM, FSU & UF had won 8 NC's since 1980 ... isn't it 9?

The best day of the year is the first warm day of spring/winter when the shorts come out.

down here thats EVERY DAY of the year.

omnicarrier Wrote:It's not as though Memphis, ECU, or UCF are likely to go anywhere in that time frame.

Probably true. However, the sooner those programs gain the advantages of BCS membership, the sooner they can be championship-caliber members of the Big East, pulling their own weight.

Wait till the ice age hits, Hockey will become the sports god of America.

Pittsburgh is still a hot bed for H.S. talent and on any given nite the top game gets a larger crowd than the Pirates do. Funny thing is the Sat games recieve large attendance as well.