Ohio was making solid progress towards having strong ties to high schools across the state, and their remote camps in places like Cincy and Cleveland were well attended. Unfortunately, the NCAA banned schools from having off-campus coaching camps, and that, as they say, killed that. It's a lot easier for Cincy or Miami to attract Cincinnati area players to a football camp that it is to get those kids to come all the way to Athens for a football camp. The same holds true for the Cleveland area. Akron and Kent State are going to have a lot better chance of getting a NE Ohio player into their camps than Ohio is.
That change didn't kill Ohio's in-state recruiting, but it certainly makes it more difficult. Ohio has had to change and adapt with the times, and that means that the number of in-state recruits goes up and down, and Ohio has to do their best to get the best players they can from anywhere in the country (or world) that they can.
It makes it tough considering OU is in the one corner of the state without a major metro area producing D-1 kids consistently, which means you have to latch your fortunes to Columbus, which in itself is a recruiting bloodbath already for any and all schools. Unfortunately, recruiting in-state is always going to be an uphill. Consistently winning and taking advantage of kids transferring from P5 schools back home appears to be options that are viable to us, but competing for kids straight out of HS to recruit to OU is always going to be a challenge.
Exactly. Not impossible, but an uphill battle. When Ohio could conduct coaching camps in Cincinnati and Cleveland, the field was more even.
We haven't brought the camps up as a subject on here in a long time but I'm skeptical of the lower in-state numbers have a lot to do with no longer running them as they were only permissible for a few years. That and 90% of Ohio students don't attend from the immediate region anyways. With the highways today all the major in-state recruiting areas are within 2-3 hours.
Watching Ohio play BG this year I couldn't help but note the number of Northwest Ohio players on the roster. Northwest Ohio is a mediocre football recruiting territory. I don't know if it says a lot to load up on in-state players at the G5 level in the state of Ohio.
Depends on where you go to in NW Ohio. If they're getting recruits from Toledo CC and from the NLL suburban schools, along with farm boys that play in the Midwest Athletic Conference, then they can be a solid team. Not great but solid. What makes Bowling Green a load and a half is when they combine that with good Columbus/I-75 talent that they can occasionally get.
Toledo MO's recruiting historically has been get the best of the area, go over the state-lines heavily into Michigan, and because of the program's coaching ties to Mount Union, they can walk into Western PA and get kids too. And even then, that happened prior as they always valued the Western PA kids as well.
As to the driving logic, it's a heckuva lot easier to convince kids from Cleveland to take the turnpike to Toledo than it is to get off I-77, veer onto US-50, and drive like grandma because of either orange barrels or the number of local sheriff's sitting on that road. Sorry guys, even as a NW Ohio kid here myself, even I could recruit against that and annihilate Ohio in those regards. With no roads that are 70mph into Athens, distance will always be a battle for OU, especially when it comes to the family coming to games. Jokingly, if we could fundraise for anything, it would be to figure out how to make Routes 33, Route 50, and Route 32 all major highways clocking 70mph at all points from a major metro or from I-77. As we can all relate to, that drive from Columbus to Athens has sped up significantly since they put in the bypass. Would love to see more of that work being done, especially the stupid speed trap once you pass the Fun Barn or outside of Logan (end rant and hatred of my speed trap history)
Last Edited: 1/2/2024 6:16:06 PM by Buckeye to Bobcat