Harbaugh smart to go south to recruit
Jim Harbaugh isn’t going to win a national championship with players raised in Michigan. There aren’t enough of them. Not elite players, anyway.
This is not a revelation to anyone who follows college football. It’s a fact.
Title teams need talent, and the country’s football talent doesn’t primarily reside in Michigan.
No wonder Harbaugh is taking his team to Florida for spring break, into the center of the deepest talent pool in the country. It’s not rocket science.
But it is smart, ingenious, really, borrowing from the same strategy used by our major political parties when settling on a convention site: go to the state that offers a lot of votes.
If we can agree about nothing else in college football, we can agree on this: the best programs are the best campaigners — selling begets winning. In this way, college football is nothing like the NFL, the closest thing we have to a true meritocracy in team sports. It’s more like baseball, where geography is often the deciding factor, and big-market teams have an unfair financial advantage over everyone else.
Coaches and administrators in college football know this. Harbaugh is doing everything he can to overcome it. So … Florida! Where he gets to operate at the IMG Academy, home to almost a dozen of 2017’s top recruits, and where he will get a week of unlimited publicity, just made juicier by the reaction of the sport’s pre-eminent conference — the SEC. It’s not happy. Neither is its commissioner, Greg Sankey, who wants the NCAA to block Harbaugh’s trip south.
Here is what Sankey told CBSSports.com: “Our primary reaction [is] that, in the face of the time-demand conversations, we’ve got one program taking what has been ‘free time’ away.’ Let’s draw a line and say, ‘That’s not appropriate.’ ”
First of all, “time-demand conversations” is the language of politicians and hucksters, a made-up phrase designed to imply his football program cares about academics. It doesn’t. And neither do we. Not really. But for the purposes of this conversation, let’s take Sankey at face value … sorry, done laughing yet?
Look, this is nothing more than a turf war, the oligarchs doing battle, not unlike corporate lobbyists greasing the central machinery in order to tip the scales. In a way, it’s amusing; listening to folks like Sankey pretend it’s actually about the players — or should I say, student-athletes?
But, mostly, it’s ridiculous, because the schools that comprise the SEC step away from their campuses into the most fertile recruiting territory in the history of college football. Never has a geographical area been so loaded, and the proof is in the titles the SEC keeps winning.
Even the traditionally talent-rich states in the Midwest — Ohio and Pennsylvania — don’t produce the players they used to. Turns out people like sun, and jobs, and shrimp and grits. Can you blame them? Of course not, shrimp and grits are tasty. So is the prospect of winning.
Consider: of the top 100 prospects signed last week (according to Rivals), only 16 lived outside the south and southwest and California. The same ratio holds true for the next 100 top recruits, and for the next 100 after that.
Sankey and the SEC don’t want to give up that territorial advantage. Harbaugh wants to blow it up.
He’s got a point. He’s got a plan, too, and in the current state of affairs in college football, he should be allowed to keep it.