Bcat2--I thought Solich was revered in high school locker rooms throughout Ohio? Maybe. But apparently not to the extent of bringing in any notably good players.

It seems every MAC school has a different philosophy. In my high school coaching days, I remember talking to MAC coaches about this topic. Some said if the kid is a major prospect that won't even talk to him, wasted time and energy since they can't compete with the power conferences. Others thought it was good to get a bug in his ear to at least let them know that if the power conference began to shy away they were still interested. Talking to my coaching friends, things haven't changed in the last couple of years. I don't know the final MAC numbers, but it is a little disconcerting to realize that the Buckeyes might have had more players drafted than the MAC combined.

Sadly, I am not sure it is going to change. The reality of the situation is that there are less kids playing high school football and that trend shows no signs of ending. Big time talent will naturally gravitate to the power conferences. It will really become more notifiable in about 10 years. The numbers I am hearing concerning kids playing youth football is pretty sobering.

Totally agree. Football's Golden Age has passed and football itself will eventually become America's 3rd or 4th favorite sport, if that.

There seems to be quite a bit of press espousing that view. Doing a little more study of the topic paints a slightly different picture. While Pop Warner numbers are declining signicantly, the high school numbers have decreased by 2.5% or so in the last 7-8 years or so and actually went up in 2013. There are still more kids playing high school football than any other sport. Some believe that the introduction of soccer and lacrosse has cut into the football numbers, but there's no crash in the numbers as of now.
I'm guessing that parents are delaying their kids from playing football until they're older( definitely a good thing to me). There is no denying that there is a lot more attention to the health problem(again a major development which is positive).
I wouldn't write off the sport quite yet.

I believe the decline in participation in youth football - peewee thru HS - began 25 or so years ago.

Some perspective. From about 1980 thru 1992 while we were living in suburban Cleveland, I coached club soccer teams. And by then, soccer in major metro areas already was attracting many superb athletes. Mostly Caucasian but not entirely. My top club team - won a state tournament title - included two Africa-Americans, an ethnic Chinese and my two Korean-born sons. Many of those boys went on to play college soccer - at Princeton, Cleveland State (2), Bowling Green, Ohio State, Marietta, Ashland, Evansville, Trinity (TX)and I'm forgetting a couple. My son Ben played with a club team at OU.

But for me one instance in particular foretold the future of football. At my sons' junior high, the soccer and football fields adjoined each other, separated only by a narrow grass strip. One day I left work early to watch a junior high soccer game. Simultaneously junior highs were playing a football game. I watched both games and one reality jolted me: Many of the faster, better athletes were not the ones playing football.

Colobobcat66, I can tell you that in many areas of Ohio, and I would have to believe this is on a national scale as well the most concerning statistic is the rapidly declining youth and junior high football participation numbers. The kids playing high school football now weren't really connected to all of the concussion news we have heard about in the last couple of years. It is those kids who are between the ages of 10-14. This is the troubling number.

I would hasten to add the expense and time spent on summer camps in not only football but hockey, soccer etc also burns kids out who (along with their parents) have delusions of grandeur about pro careers. Sadly, when reality tells them there is no college scholarship on the horizon hard choices have to be made.

I had not idea that these camps can cost parents thousands of dollars per kid each summer. One dad told me that after three summers his kid said enough when he realized he wasn't even going to start and then found out how much his parents had spent. The fun and the challenge of getting better which we dealt with when we were kids has become something else, especially for those kids in big suburban high schools. This is one part of the equation; hearing some former pro football players saying that because of the concussion scare they won't let their kids play football is another.

I hope so, there is always a rush to judgement and then a pull back. It is quite complicated, but I wonder about about how many kids are only playing one sport when they once played two or three. I am more familiar with smaller schools, but I am now just finding out how difficult it is for kids to play sports in big suburban schools where they probably won't make the team. I do believe even though there are many more kids today, on a percentage basis there are fewer and fewer kids playing football than the 1970s or 1980s.