I suspect that to some extent the Minnesota high school football pool has been traditionally undervalued by the rating agencies. I based this on the fact that Minnesota and Dakota Division II and III schools, which draw heavily on that pool, such as Minnesota-Duluth, Minnesota State-Mankato, North Dakota, and St Johns, have competed successfully in recent years at the national level. There is also North Dakota State, which has dominated the FBS Championships winning 6 of the last 7.
There are inherent limitations on the rating agencies ability to rate accurately hundreds of widely dispersed players, and I’m sure that they understandably tend to focus on areas of the country that have been traditional producers of top rated talent, such as the South. With only one division 1 program in the state, which is a program that has had only limited success in the past half-century, there has been little reason for them to focus on the Minnesota pool.
This not to say that there are not other factors that do in fact limit the quality of the Minnesota pool in comparison with other parts of the country, such as a lesser emphasis on youth programs in this state and the popularity of hockey in some parts of it. But I don’t think any limitations that might currently exist in the pool present an insuperable barrier to the elevation of Minnesota football to where it is a consistent competitor at the national level. For the first half-century of the program – a time in which we won 7 national titles – that exactly what it was.
The problem in my view, is that over the past 50 years or so, we have not seen, until recently, the kind of commitment to the program that is needed to reach that level. That is no accident. Even as we were winning our last national title in the early sixties, which is when I graduated from the university, faculty pressure resulted in a de-emphasis of the revenue sports – especially football. More recently, though, we have seen a recommitment to these sports as evident by investments in facilities and a willingness to pay competitive salaries for coaches. If this level of commitment is sustained, I am confident that we will eventually get to where we all want to be.