Jon Wilner's latest on the woes of the Pac-12. This is with recruiting for football (which has been suffering from National programs like Alabama - who had three starting Bear State players - poaching California), and the drop in High School participation.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/01/30/f...nferences/

California numbers playing Football
2013 season: 103,474
2014 season: 103,740
2015 season: 100,205
2016 season: 97,079
2017 season: 94,286

8.8% drop in 5 years. Other states (Colorado, Utah, Washington, Oregon, Arizona) have seen a drop of 2.8%. California dominates still with 20,000 more players than the other 5 states combined.

Quote:The primary pipelines for the SEC, ACC, Big 12 and Big Ten have not experienced nearly the same level of participation decline as California.

In fact, numbers are up slightly over the past five years in Texas (164,544 to 164,664), Florida (40,606 to 41,852) and Georgia (32,979 to 33,027) while declining about four percent in Ohio (44,431 to 42,637).

Texas actually looks like a decline in the rate of participation given the population growth. They have probably peaked and will start a decline like Ohio is seeing. Still amazing that Texas is larger than Florida and California combined.

Ohio's population has basically flat-lined, with a 0.67% growth from the last census. Fear of concussion type injuries are going to be a factor going forward, but I think the current decline is due to multiple factors. Back in the late 80s when I was in high school, like my peers I played football in the fall, wrestled and played baseball in the spring. Kids are sticking to one sport and playing/training for it year round. There are also economic issues at play as well which result in limited participation of sports.

(01-30-2019 03:45 PM)Stugray2 Wrote:  Jon Wilner's latest on the woes of the Pac-12. This is with recruiting for football (which has been suffering from National programs like Alabama - who had three starting Bear State players - poaching California), and the drop in High School participation.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/01/30/f...nferences/

California numbers playing Football
2013 season: 103,474
2014 season: 103,740
2015 season: 100,205
2016 season: 97,079
2017 season: 94,286

8.8% drop in 5 years. Other states (Colorado, Utah, Washington, Oregon, Arizona) have seen a drop of 2.8%. California dominates still with 20,000 more players than the other 5 states combined.

Quote:The primary pipelines for the SEC, ACC, Big 12 and Big Ten have not experienced nearly the same level of participation decline as California.

In fact, numbers are up slightly over the past five years in Texas (164,544 to 164,664), Florida (40,606 to 41,852) and Georgia (32,979 to 33,027) while declining about four percent in Ohio (44,431 to 42,637).

Texas actually looks like a decline in the rate of participation given the population growth. They have probably peaked and will start a decline like Ohio is seeing. Still amazing that Texas is larger than Florida and California combined.

Probably another reason the Pac12 wouldnt mind getting into the Texas market.

Wilner is often Pollyannish (i.e., he thinks things are worse than they are). There is a decline nationwide but it's not going to lead to a significant drop in the "pipeline" for college football for at least 20 more years. It's a slow trickle.

A few more statistics:
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2019/j...ain-trauma

Quote:Football remains the top high school sport overall, and the most popular among male athletes. More than a million boys played in 2017 – nearly double the number that participated in outdoor track and field (600,097) or basketball (551,373), and greater than the amount who played baseball (487,097) and soccer (456,362) combined.

One caveat about that paragraph is that football needs a lot more athletes than other sports. There are twice as many boys playing HS football as basketball, which is ok when the numbers in both sports are high, but when the numbers are lower it's not -- a HS basketball program that drops to 20 boys can still have varsity and JV teams, but a HS football program with twice as many, 40, is probably only going to field a varsity team and would prefer to have more players even if they only have one squad.

And here's a graphic from another article, which indicates that even at the current rate of decline, in 5 years there will still be at least as many HS football players as there were in 1998:


IMO the biggest reason for a net drop on any HS team compared to 20-30 years ago is the rise in travel sports for kids, and the result being that fewer kids play more than one high school sport. 30 years ago, a really good athlete might have played HS football, basketball, and baseball; today, if his most promising sport is baseball, he's going to be playing on a travel baseball team year round and not playing HS football or basketball.

(01-30-2019 03:45 PM)Stugray2 Wrote:  Jon Wilner's latest on the woes of the Pac-12. This is with recruiting for football (which has been suffering from National programs like Alabama - who had three starting Bear State players - poaching California), and the drop in High School participation.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/01/30/f...nferences/

California numbers playing Football
2013 season: 103,474
2014 season: 103,740
2015 season: 100,205
2016 season: 97,079
2017 season: 94,286

8.8% drop in 5 years. Other states (Colorado, Utah, Washington, Oregon, Arizona) have seen a drop of 2.8%. California dominates still with 20,000 more players than the other 5 states combined.

Quote:The primary pipelines for the SEC, ACC, Big 12 and Big Ten have not experienced nearly the same level of participation decline as California.

In fact, numbers are up slightly over the past five years in Texas (164,544 to 164,664), Florida (40,606 to 41,852) and Georgia (32,979 to 33,027) while declining about four percent in Ohio (44,431 to 42,637).

Texas actually looks like a decline in the rate of participation given the population growth. They have probably peaked and will start a decline like Ohio is seeing. Still amazing that Texas is larger than Florida and California combined.

I more or less made the same point in the Canzanno thread:

https://www.csnbbs.com/thread-864768-pos...id15713141

and Sactowndog vehemently argued that it wasn't true. Having lived there for 20 years, I saw it happening just in the time I was there. It's only going to get worse, too. Whether people want to admit it, football has a serious problem. Lots of moms don't want their kids to play football because of the concussions.

USFFan

Wedge,

Look at the curve change from about 2014. That is a rapid drop. Travel costs and specialization were already a factor in the early 2000s. And I know middle class families were already steering boys away from football at that time. What has changed since then are two things:

1) Demographics: Whites and Blacks are declining portions of the US population, but the primary athletic pool
-- that drop has been most precipitous in California where Whites are less than 40% of High School age youth and Blacks are below 5%
2) CTE is driving not just middle class families from football, it is having an impact down the socio-economic ladder
-- the NFL is pushing flag football for youth trying to rebuild the pool going into High School
-- Pop Warner and other pre-HS football has vanished from many communities, meaning fewer kids ever play the game

The impact at the High School level is that teams are finding it harder to be filled organically, from kids just wanting to continue to play, as they never played before. They are far more likely to have played Soccer or Basketball. This makes recruiting athletes something of a "cold call" sales effort. You also have many parents pushing back. (My son was being recruited by his High School, but his mother was a hard "no", and she was not the only one whose child was on other varsity teams that said "not my son".)

I think when families had 3 or 4 boys, and we were used to losing 1,000 young men a month in a minor war, the tolerance level was much higher for risk. But that is not the case anymore. Culturally Football speaks to generations now in their 50s or older best, but much less to the more urban and dynamic culture of today. It's a hard sell to risk life and limb compared to the easy sell in the past.

(01-30-2019 04:29 PM)Stugray2 Wrote:  Wedge,

Look at the curve change from about 2014. That is a rapid drop.

It is, but as I said above, even if the numbers continue to decrease at that rate, there will still be at least as many HS football players in 2023 as there were in 1998, when AFAIK no one was complaining that there weren't enough HS players coming through to fill college teams.

Also, this is gradually becoming a depth problem for HS coaches, but probably not a drought in recruits for FBS college teams. The kids who choose not to participate now are either kids who were just barely good enough for HS football or multi-sport kids who wouldn't have chosen football after HS anyway.

This is 100% caused by demographics.

In 2010, there were 2,823,940 Californians aged 15-19. In 2017, there were 2,609,110. This is an 8.2% decline, almost the exact same as the decline in the number of kids playing football.

CA's birthrate is falling - the total fertility rate is down 23% in the last 10 years, and down 32% since 1990. In 1990 CA had the 3rd highest state fertility rate, and now it's 40th. So the high-school age population will continue to shrink.

As easy as it would be to blame this on concussion culture or soccer-playing immigrants replacing native-born Americans in CA (net loss of 138,000 Americans moved out of CA last year), that's not what's happening.

The key is the quality, not the quantity. The football talent is still being produced in California. If your a marginal football player, then maybe you participate in another sport. There are too many options for kids in California and football is just one of them. In Texas, the first option is football, then everything else.

The Pac-12, because of the weaknesses of UCLA and USC football, is struggling to keep top high school players in state. According to rivals.com, out of the top 25 players in California in 2019, one is going to UCLA and three to USC. Texas has recruited three of the top 25, including the #2 ranked player. Florida got the #3 player, Clemson got the #4 player, South Carolina got the #6 player, Michigan got the #8 player. Oregon got seven of the top 25, including the #1 ranked player. Not a good trend.

Texas Head Coach Tom Herman, who was raised in California and played his college football at Cal Lutheran, has grabbed four recruits out of California and two out of Arizona for 2019. Also not a good trend for the Pac-12.

(01-30-2019 04:53 PM)Captain Bearcat Wrote:  This is 100% caused by demographics.

In 2010, there were 2,823,940 Californians aged 15-19. In 2017, there were 2,609,110. This is an 8.2% decline, almost the exact same as the decline in the number of kids playing football.

CA's birthrate is falling - the total fertility rate is down 23% in the last 10 years, and down 32% since 1990. In 1990 CA had the 3rd highest state fertility rate, and now it's 40th. So the high-school age population will continue to shrink.

As easy as it would be to blame this on concussion culture or soccer-playing immigrants replacing native-born Americans in CA (net loss of 138,000 Americans moved out of CA last year), that's not what's happening.

I think you are underrating the shift. California is over 40% Hispanic at the HS level, and 15% Asian. But you don't see 60% of the 3 to 5 star HS Football players being Asian and Hispanic. The reliance is heavily on the 5% of the population which is African American, and a lesser extent on the 35% White. These are mostly native born Americans. The demographic is not at all what you see east of the Rockies.

The Chart by the way is National. If you notice California is less than 10% of the 1.1 Million, inline with the 12% of the population in California. Texas is out sized over double the national participation rate, California, under represented by 1/3rd.

In the South and Texas, African Americans make up over 1/5th the population, almost 5x a proportion you see in the West. Asians a mere 3-4%, and Hispanics closer to their 15% National number (Texas it's over 35% -- but more of them "white" identify than you see in California).

California's birth rate is not the only source of children. We are one of five states where 85% of immigrants come to. Many schools have 10% or more foreign born children, and I am talking about suburbs (whether Israel, Korea or India). That has to be factored in. We have not seen an 8% decline in school enrollment. It's been a slight increase over that time frame. So the children are coming from somewhere else.

I agree the P12 needs a Texas school, and to tap into that large pool. But AI required for P12 is met by only 9 FBS schools west of the Mississippi (in order):

Rice
SMU
BYU
Texas
Baylor
Oklahoma
Kansas
TCU

(Colorado State and Iowa State miss the cut of matching Utah and Arizona State as a minimum bar --- Washington State is terrible, and cannot be used as a measure, too far off the back, down with the likes of Houston, Oklahoma State, Kansas State and Texas Tech ... WSU would not get invited to the Pac-12 if there was a do-over).

You can quickly cull Baylor and BYU due to their heavy handed religious interference and T9 issues. Not being research schools gives and easy excuse to exclude. OU and UT are unattainable (their leaving for B1G or SEC is what would make other schools available). SMU is in the same metro as TCU, similar type of school (nominal religious ties, but not operational, and anyway a very liberal denomination with no LGBT or T9 issues), but a far smaller athletic program. Rice isn't much of an athletic program, they'd have to grow their department 50% even to be in shouting range of consideration.

So you are pretty much left with TCU (but no research) and KU as plausible targets. KU might well get an invite to another conference on their own merits as an institution.

Texas looks difficult for the Pac-12 to even get a foothold in.

(01-30-2019 03:53 PM)CliftonAve Wrote:  Ohio's population has basically flat-lined, with a 0.67% growth from the last census. Fear of concussion type injuries are going to be a factor going forward, but I think the current decline is due to multiple factors. Back in the late 80s when I was in high school, like my peers I played football in the fall, wrestled and played baseball in the spring. Kids are sticking to one sport and playing/training for it year round. There are also economic issues at play as well which result in limited participation of sports.

And Ohio has gotten older. About 10 years ago (2008 or 2009 or so) I remember reading the number of high school seniors in Ohio was down 25%! from 1980.

(01-30-2019 04:08 PM)Wedge Wrote:  Wilner is often Pollyannish (i.e., he thinks things are worse than they are). There is a decline nationwide but it's not going to lead to a significant drop in the "pipeline" for college football for at least 20 more years. It's a slow trickle.

A few more statistics:
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2019/j...ain-trauma

Quote:Football remains the top high school sport overall, and the most popular among male athletes. More than a million boys played in 2017 – nearly double the number that participated in outdoor track and field (600,097) or basketball (551,373), and greater than the amount who played baseball (487,097) and soccer (456,362) combined.

One caveat about that paragraph is that football needs a lot more athletes than other sports. There are twice as many boys playing HS football as basketball, which is ok when the numbers in both sports are high, but when the numbers are lower it's not -- a HS basketball program that drops to 20 boys can still have varsity and JV teams, but a HS football program with twice as many, 40, is probably only going to field a varsity team and would prefer to have more players even if they only have one squad.

And here's a graphic from another article, which indicates that even at the current rate of decline, in 5 years there will still be at least as many HS football players as there were in 1998:


IMO the biggest reason for a net drop on any HS team compared to 20-30 years ago is the rise in travel sports for kids, and the result being that fewer kids play more than one high school sport. 30 years ago, a really good athlete might have played HS football, basketball, and baseball; today, if his most promising sport is baseball, he's going to be playing on a travel baseball team year round and not playing HS football or basketball.

Yep. The rise of select programs is a factor. It's not even just a matter of parents or athletes choosing to do that, you kind of have to now if you want to make it. In baseball and soccer, if you want to play for a big-time high school team, you have to play select in middle school. Coaches will only pull from particular programs to fill their rosters. Really, a lot of the shady stuff people talk about with the AAU and college basketball is just as bad with most sports once you go down to the high school level.

It has a horribly stifling effect on talent development, too. Ask anyone that follows the USMNT closely about how select programs are impacting American soccer and you'll get some VERY strong opinions.

And then with the small schools, you are either going to see them go to eight man or combine with other small schools to get enough bodies to play. This is what happened at my niece's HS in NY.

(01-30-2019 06:38 PM)Stugray2 Wrote:  

(01-30-2019 04:53 PM)Captain Bearcat Wrote:  This is 100% caused by demographics.

In 2010, there were 2,823,940 Californians aged 15-19. In 2017, there were 2,609,110. This is an 8.2% decline, almost the exact same as the decline in the number of kids playing football.

CA's birthrate is falling - the total fertility rate is down 23% in the last 10 years, and down 32% since 1990. In 1990 CA had the 3rd highest state fertility rate, and now it's 40th. So the high-school age population will continue to shrink.

As easy as it would be to blame this on concussion culture or soccer-playing immigrants replacing native-born Americans in CA (net loss of 138,000 Americans moved out of CA last year), that's not what's happening.

I think you are underrating the shift. California is over 40% Hispanic at the HS level, and 15% Asian. But you don't see 60% of the 3 to 5 star HS Football players being Asian and Hispanic. The reliance is heavily on the 5% of the population which is African American, and a lesser extent on the 35% White. These are mostly native born Americans. The demographic is not at all what you see east of the Rockies.

The Chart by the way is National. If you notice California is less than 10% of the 1.1 Million, inline with the 12% of the population in California. Texas is out sized over double the national participation rate, California, under represented by 1/3rd.

In the South and Texas, African Americans make up over 1/5th the population, almost 5x a proportion you see in the West. Asians a mere 3-4%, and Hispanics closer to their 15% National number (Texas it's over 35% -- but more of them "white" identify than you see in California).

California's birth rate is not the only source of children. We are one of five states where 85% of immigrants come to. Many schools have 10% or more foreign born children, and I am talking about suburbs (whether Israel, Korea or India). That has to be factored in. We have not seen an 8% decline in school enrollment. It's been a slight increase over that time frame. So the children are coming from somewhere else.

If CA hasn't seen an 8% decline in school enrollment, then that's only because there's fewer dropouts today. Because the number of 15-19 year olds is down 8%.

CA's hispanic population is more culturally American than the non-hispanic white population. I'd guess 2/3 of CA Hispanics have been in the USA for 3 generations or more. They're more likely to be football fans than the SF white liberals.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/02/01/c...nt-add-up/

USFFan

(01-31-2019 08:04 PM)Captain Bearcat Wrote:  

(01-30-2019 06:38 PM)Stugray2 Wrote:  

(01-30-2019 04:53 PM)Captain Bearcat Wrote:  This is 100% caused by demographics.

In 2010, there were 2,823,940 Californians aged 15-19. In 2017, there were 2,609,110. This is an 8.2% decline, almost the exact same as the decline in the number of kids playing football.

CA's birthrate is falling - the total fertility rate is down 23% in the last 10 years, and down 32% since 1990. In 1990 CA had the 3rd highest state fertility rate, and now it's 40th. So the high-school age population will continue to shrink.

As easy as it would be to blame this on concussion culture or soccer-playing immigrants replacing native-born Americans in CA (net loss of 138,000 Americans moved out of CA last year), that's not what's happening.

I think you are underrating the shift. California is over 40% Hispanic at the HS level, and 15% Asian. But you don't see 60% of the 3 to 5 star HS Football players being Asian and Hispanic. The reliance is heavily on the 5% of the population which is African American, and a lesser extent on the 35% White. These are mostly native born Americans. The demographic is not at all what you see east of the Rockies.

The Chart by the way is National. If you notice California is less than 10% of the 1.1 Million, inline with the 12% of the population in California. Texas is out sized over double the national participation rate, California, under represented by 1/3rd.

In the South and Texas, African Americans make up over 1/5th the population, almost 5x a proportion you see in the West. Asians a mere 3-4%, and Hispanics closer to their 15% National number (Texas it's over 35% -- but more of them "white" identify than you see in California).

California's birth rate is not the only source of children. We are one of five states where 85% of immigrants come to. Many schools have 10% or more foreign born children, and I am talking about suburbs (whether Israel, Korea or India). That has to be factored in. We have not seen an 8% decline in school enrollment. It's been a slight increase over that time frame. So the children are coming from somewhere else.

If CA hasn't seen an 8% decline in school enrollment, then that's only because there's fewer dropouts today. Because the number of 15-19 year olds is down 8%.

CA's hispanic population is more culturally American than the non-hispanic white population. I'd guess 2/3 of CA Hispanics have been in the USA for 3 generations or more. They're more likely to be football fans than the SF white liberals.

There’s a difference among Hispanics. Mexicans follow and understand football since the NFL is very popular in Mexico. Their children and grandchildren are more than likely to play football in middle and high school because of it. But Argentines, Colombians and Peruvians are into soccer while Venezuelans, Dominicans and Cubans prefer baseball.

(02-01-2019 03:23 PM)usffan Wrote:  https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/02/01/c...nt-add-up/

USFFan

This is not surprising. If you live in a place like Los Altos, you have a lot of options. Beverly Hills also had a 33 man roster for football this year. They lost their five league games by a combined score of 245-12. It could have been worse, one game was stopped after the 1st quarter due to lightning with BH trailing 21-0.

https://blog.pacificunion.com/california...zip-codes/

80% of the most expensive zip codes in the country are in California. If you live in one of these zip codes, you have other options and other interests. Los Altos is in the top ten.