The Harbaugh effect: Changing college football recruiting’s gravitational pull
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Version 0 of 1. From 1970 to 2010, Florida’s population almost tripled, Georgia’s doubled, Texas’s more than doubled and California’s managed to double even with 19 million already there to begin with. More people meant more adolescent football players, steeper football competition, better football capability and, in turn, a sense the Midwest had gone passé. ¶ In that same time frame, the populations of Ohio, Michigan, Illinois and Pennsylvania barely budged upward. Come the new century, the Southeastern Conference would spend an eight-season span winning seven national college football titles and finishing runner-up twice more. ¶ What has happened this decade, then, is a study of the force of a Mount Rushmore-type personality, or now, two. As Coach Urban Meyer and Ohio State square off with Coach Jim Harbaugh and Michigan on Saturday in Ann Arbor, Mich., both sides know a Michigan State win over visiting Penn State will mean they’ll scrap for only second place in the Big Ten East Division. ¶ Yet in the less-attended game that matters almost as much — recruiting — Meyer and Harbaugh have changed the national landscape just enough to matter. [The Harbaugh Effect, Part 2: A Big Blue economic boom] Meyer, born and raised in Ohio, began changing it on Nov. 28, 2011, when he signed on at Ohio State and brought along the know-how from his two national championships at Florida, his perfect 2004 season at Utah and his startling 17-6 stay at Bowling Green while debuting as a head coach at 36. Harbaugh, raised largely in Michigan, began changing it further on Dec. 29, 2014, when he signed on at Michigan and bought along a double-expert knowledge of the NFL, the league that is merely the goal of 99.99 percent of all the recruits who do those televised hat-choosing rituals. “The tide has been changed,” said Thomas Wilcher, who played running back alongside Harbaugh as quarterback at Michigan in the mid-1980s and coaches Cass Technical High in Detroit which, for one thing, has three alumni on Meyer’s current roster at Ohio State. It’s not that the tide has surged. That other Tide, Alabama, to name one place, still welcomes awesome lists of visiting recruits from across the country on game weekends. It’s just that it has shifted enough to allow the Big Ten back to viability and, said Midwest recruiting analyst Josh Helmholdt of Rivals.com, “Urban Meyer really started that.” In Michigan, the tenor has intensified. Harbaugh has brought the presence of a very rare coach who played NFL quarterback and coached in three NFC championship games and one Super Bowl. “I think it matters, like, 200 percent,” Wilcher said. “Yeah, because you’ve got a coach who’s proven. You’ve got a coach who knows about where you want to go [the NFL]. You’ve got a coach who has influence in where you’re trying to go. And you’ve got a coach who has ties to where you want to go. “So it’s great.” Deepening that, Michigan has thrived quickly under Harbaugh, going 9-2 after spending seven seasons at a plebeian 46-42. Chitchat among prep players has changed, Wilcher said, from, “They’re not Michigan anymore,” to, “We can compete at Michigan.” [The Harbaugh Effect, Part 1: The anticipation on campus] Edging out into the greater Midwest, things have changed even as they had changed already with Meyer’s presence, even before his national title last January gave yet another boost to the idea of the Big Ten. If you wanted, Ben Bredeson could take you to Arrowhead High in Hartland, Wis., and show you the very parking space in which he sat. He had finished a workout. He had received a message that Harbaugh would call in 20 minutes. His family’s home is two minutes away, but he sat tight. He felt the nerves. He worried about what to say. “It was hard to recognize at first, because his voice was all raspy,” said Bredeson, a four-star, 6-foot-5, 293-pound offensive tackle whom Rivals.com ranks as the nation’s No. 60 overall college prospect and No. 4 at his position. “It was weird,” Bredeson said, “to see somebody who was that famous and he’s calling me on my phone at school.” Prior to that, Bredeson had “loved the school and loved the football program, but it just wasn’t enough to put it over the edge with some of the other choices I had, like Notre Dame and Ohio State.” Then a Michigan assistant Bredeson already liked, Greg Mattison, raved about the new staff as he stayed on from Brady Hoke to Harbaugh. Then Bredeson met with the Michigan coaches and observed the fresh intensity of the Michigan practices. Then he knew which school he would attend. “They just have a plan for everything,” he said. Factor in, of course, he said, “some crazy number of years that the coach and his staff has in the NFL,” believed to total 53, counting the nine (out of 11 total) staff members with NFL experience. “There’s so much experience with how the system works, what it takes to get there and what it takes to succeed.” The Harbaugh arrival, Helmholdt said, has “done more for Michigan on a positive scale than it has done negatively for opponents at this point.” Michigan predecessors Rich Rodriguez and Hoke “both were able to recruit high-caliber players, but the momentum was slowing. Immediately [Harbaugh] reenergized that.” It’s odd, then, that Michigan also might gain steam here and there from Meyer, who refers to Michigan dismissively as “the Team Up North,” and governs a football complex with hallway posters documenting the Buckeyes’ recent domination of “TUN.” Helmholdt thinks Meyer lifted not only Ohio State, but all the Big Ten boats, their allure enhanced by the fresh energy in their league. Wisconsin, Helmholdt notes, stands No. 26 in the Rivals 2016 recruiting rankings, seven places higher than it has finished in any year since 2002. “The Big Ten has a better name on the national stage and certainly in the Midwest than it did five years ago,” Helmholdt said, “and a lot of that is due to Urban Meyer. That’s not to say it’s supplanted the SEC nationally but it certainly has a higher profile than it did as a conference five or six years ago.” It has shifted enough even that Meyer feels some anxiety about the Ohioan players culled by others when national players take up spots at Ohio State. “Those darn guys wind up at Michigan State and become great players,” he said at Big Ten media days last July. “It’s alarming.” Last Saturday in Columbus, an Ohioan playing for Michigan State threw a touchdown pass to another Ohioan playing for Michigan State, alongside 58 hard rushing yards from the Ohioan who leads Michigan State in rushing, all of which helped overcome the injury to the Ohioan three-year starting quarterback. After all of that, an Ohioan kicked the field goal that provided the 17-14 upset that turned the season and burnished the Michigan State kingdom still further. [Ohio State fades, and for at least a night, it looks pretty black] Michigan State, of course, also has a whole lot of Michigan on its roster, and even at 34-4 across three seasons, it likes to rev itself on its chronic status as an afterthought. That identity might be deepened with both Meyer and Harbaugh now dialing up recruits, beginning near home and rippling outward into the country. While the more southern latitudes still have deeper pools of multistar talent, Helmholdt said, the coming years might see fewer occasions such as Laquon Treadwell, the coveted wide receiver from near Chicago, choosing Ole Miss of the SEC. Farther away from the Midwest, most players, like most humans, stay within reasonable range of home. It’s the vital player here and there who might see Meyer or Harbaugh and find the plane rides more than palatable. One of those, an Ohio State quarterback from Wichita Falls, Tex., hands off these days to another of those, an Ohio State running back from St. Louis. Meyer “has a certain magnetism,” said Stacy Elliott, the father of Ezekiel Elliott, the Missouri-raised running back who has gained 3,336 yards for Ohio State the past two seasons. [Elliott apologies for criticizing play calls, though Meyer defends him] Yet another such player, Raekwon McMillan, sat at a televised table in Hinesville, Ga., just southwest of Savannah, in February 2014, ready to make his college announcement. Smashing in a white suit with dark bow tie, this five-star linebacker sat before five hats. “My chest’s beating,” he said, his family smiling around him. Briefly, he fumbled with the Alabama cap before grabbing the second one from the left and saying, “I think I’m gonna go with . . . Ohio State.” “He had the opportunity to go everywhere you can imagine,” said Woody Wommack, who analyzes the Southeast for Rivals. “He said specifically, ‘I want to win a championship,’ and he said that Urban Meyer gave him the best chance to do that. Obviously SEC fans were laughing about him at the time.” Obviously, he helped quash the Oregon offense in the victorious 2015 College Football Playoff championship game. Said Wommack, “It takes a certain type of coach, a certain name, where you can be a five-star player and visit Alabama, Georgia, Auburn 10 times, but you hear Harbaugh come in and your phone rings and he’s, ‘Hey, I’d like you to come to Michigan . . .’ ” You might even remember the very parking spot. Two such players play for one high school in Houston. Defensive tackle Marvin Wilson ranks No. 1 on the rivals.com 2017 recruiting list. Teammate Walker Little ranks No. 83 and No. 9 among offensive tackles. While Michigan has zero Texan players on its current roster, both are considering Michigan among several schools. [Harbaugh and staff are baking birthday cakes for recruits] “You know, he came down here and had a camp,” their coach, Steven Leisz, said of Harbaugh, whose presence at 11 satellite camps in seven states last offseason caused whining from some SEC coaches. “It was great to see a Big Ten school down here. And when it was all said and done, he was one of the more personable, kind of down-to-earth guys you could talk to.” The hurdle: “He’s just going to have to beat the fact of taking the kid from the South and taking him to the North.” A boon against that hurdle: “One thing our kids will look at is, ‘Can you get me to the NFL? And can you prepare me for the NFL?’ ” It sets up fresh recruiting battles with, for one, Alabama, of which Wommack said, “Alabama’s constantly reminding players how many guys are in the NFL, and how much money they’ve made, and how they came through Alabama.” While the Michigan roster will play Saturday with 49 Michiganders, 22 Ohioans, 10 Floridians, and one Californian, among other backgrounds, against an Ohio State roster with 65 Ohioans (with that state still rich in talent), six Floridians, six Georgians and three Texans, it will be interesting to study those numbers across coming seasons. As Ari Wasserman noted on Cleveland.com, Meyer’s first three classes averaged 10.3 Ohioans, while predecessor Jim Tressel’s last 10 averaged 12.2, a shift not as smallish as it might seem given 25 recruits per year. As the native Michigander and CBS analyst Gary Danielson noted of demographics up north, “There’s not as many jobs, there’s not as many Catholic schools playing football in the North as there used to be, the numbers just aren’t there.” But can some booming personalities stand athwart that? “I think you can do it,” he said. “If you recruit nationally.” “There’s a shift going on,” Bredeson said, “and it’s kind of cool to be right in the middle.” About this series: The hiring of Jim Harbaugh to coach the Michigan football team — the marriage of a highly successful coach, native son and unpredictable personality to a tradition-rich program longing to return to greatness — created a nationwide buzz. Washington Post national college sports reporter Chuck Culpepper will follow the progress of Harbaugh’s first season and its impact on and off the field. More college football coverage: The Harbaugh Effect, Part 1: The anticipation on campus The Harbaugh Effect, Part 2: A Big Blue economic boom Culpepper’s Top 25: SEC down, Dantonio up Heisman watch: A two-horse race in the homestretch |