Midwest job losses taking a toll on once dominant college football teams

Stirlyn Harris was a teenager in Barberton, Ohio, in 1980 when his father was laid off from his high-wage job at the Seiberling Tire & Rubber Co. Harris can still remember standing in the public-assistance line waiting for a block of cheese or powdered milk because his father had to take jobs offering far less per hour than what he made at the rubber plant. They were a solid, middle-class family — four-bedroom house, two-car garage — when the sudden turbulence of job loss financially pounded them and other families throughout northeastern Ohio. Harris had aunts and uncles laid off from jobs too. He said other families fled Ohio to the southern United States. Manufacturing in the region was moving to states that did not have assertive labor unions.

By 1993, the picture had not changed much for Harris. He had graduated from college with a degree in finance, and it was still a grim job market. Higher-paying manufacturing jobs were still disappearing from Ohio, Michigan, western Pennsylvania and other swaths of the Rust Belt. The jobs in the burgeoning service industry were slow to replace the lost manufacturing jobs. He remembers being offered $8 an hour to work part time as a bank teller, even with his degree.

He and his wife moved to the Atlanta area in 1994. They have two sons. One of them, Travis, grew to 6 foot 7 inches, 300 pounds. He is 18 years old and rehabbing a knee injury in hopes of catching on with a junior-college team in Georgia en route to a four-year university.

Meanwhile, Big Ten college football — which once produced one All-American after another and featured national powerhouses like Ohio State, Michigan and Michigan State — continues to give way to powerhouse football programs in the Southeast. Harris’ story and hundreds of others like his could be the explanation.

In the 1980s and 1990s, there was a migration of talent south as families left the Rust Belt for the Sun Belt. They took with them future linemen, defensive backs, running backs and linebackers and headed for better wages and stability. And it appears that, in a dark twist, the economic woes that have plagued the Midwest for decades are now taking a toll on college football — a source of community pride and togetherness even in difficult times.

“I have 10 or 11 friends from back home who moved south, and their kids played football. Mine played football,” Harris said. “When my oldest was playing youth football out in Snellville (Ga.), I would talk to parents, and many of them didn’t have a Southern accent. I knew where they were from — up North, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York.”

“I did a job visit here in June of 1994 before we moved. I opened the want ads in the Atlanta paper, and there were more pages for want ads in this paper than were pages in the whole Akron Beacon-Journal newspaper. The want ads here looked like a newspaper itself. I had three or four offers within a week. My mom asks, ‘Are you coming back to Ohio?’ I said, ‘Absolutely not.’”

The Big Ten has not won a national championship in college football since the 2002 season. It is the oldest Division I conference, once considered the best of the best for college football, and now it is rated no better than third or fourth among Division I conferences. The nine states in the Big Ten footprint produce half as many Division I prospects as states in the 11-state footprint of the Southeastern Conference, which has won seven consecutive national titles.

Gerry DiNardo, a former college coach who works for the Big Ten Network, said he recently counted approximately 500 commitments already from high school players (juniors and seniors) to SEC schools and 200 commitments to schools in the Big Ten.

Ohio State was 12-0 in the 2013 regular season, playing what many experts considered a weak schedule. The Buckeyes lost to Michigan State in the Big Ten championship game and were knocked out of contention for the national championship. Pundits across the country said Ohio State just didn’t have enough talented players to compete for the title with Southern schools such as Florida State and Auburn, which will play for the title Jan. 6.

Instead, Ohio State plays Clemson in the Orange Bowl on Friday in Miami. Curiously, Ohio State expects to sell only about half its allotment of 17,500 tickets from its ticket office, according to the Columbus Dispatch. But the team’s director of ticketing told the newspaper that a “strong alumni contingent in Florida” will likely turn out for the game.

To borrow a phrase from President Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, “It’s the economy, stupid.”

“You’re darn right it’s the economy,” said Earle Bruce, who coached Ohio State from 1979 to 1987. “The Youngstown, Massillon, Akron area and western Pennsylvania used to produce as many Division I players as any place in the country. That’s not true anymore. A lot of them are down South. They left here when the mills shut down — the steel mills and rubber plants.”

“The number of kids are not here now. Oh, there are still some good players coming out of here, and there are some good high school programs but not like there used to be. We’ve got to get the masses of our players from here, not from Florida. I don’t think there is any question we are missing players whose families have moved from north to south.”

A 2011 report by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce found that since the recession began in 2007, the Midwest lost 610,000 jobs in manufacturing, which was one-third of all manufacturing job losses nationally. It was in 2006 that the Southeastern Conference began its golden era, with seven straight national titles in college football, and the Big Ten Conference began its slide to less prominent status among Division I conferences.

The loss of jobs in the Midwest can also be attributed to a downturn for other Big Ten schools, according to DiNardo. The University of Minnesota was a solid program for 10 seasons, from 1997 to 2006, but has struggled since.

“The University of Minnesota had very good success recruiting (in) the city of Detroit,” he said. “Well, the city of Detroit has lost most of its population. In the old days, after Michigan and Michigan State went there and recruited the best high school talent, there was still a pretty good player available for Minnesota. But the population has diminished so much, that is not always the case now.”

Michigan and Michigan State have been impacted by the loss of jobs in Detroit and across the rest of the state, particularly the high school football hotbed of Flint. That city was near the core of the automobile boom.

“The commissioner of the Big Ten gets mad at me every time I say it, but there are not as many good players in the Midwest,” said Tom Lemming, a nationally recognized analyst of high school football recruiting. “It’s because of the economy. You look at a place like Ohio State. They can dominate their state recruiting, but they have to recruit nationally.”

The damage to college football was done, Harris said, in the ’80s and ’90s. He and his classmates, the ones now with high-school-age children, fled the state and took their future stars with them.

“Ohio State didn’t used to have to go south to recruit as much as they are doing now,” he said. “We had everything the Buckeyes needed back home. Not anymore.”