High School Football Participation Numbers

[Mavric]

I was going through some older issues of Sports Illustrated today and ran across an interesting article on high school football participation.  It was right after Andrew Luck retired so they were looking at how people view the safety of football and how that affects participation numbers.

 

They looked at it from the context of states that supported Trump in the last election compared to states that supported Clinton.  That was kind of interesting as well - Trump states saw participation decline by 6.1% over the last 10 years while Clinton states saw participation decline 15.7%.  Overall participation is down 9.5% even though the total population has risen 7.5%.

 

But the part I thought was really interesting was more on a regional basis.  The B1G footprint isn't doing well with participation numbers:

 

Nebraska - down 21.2%

Iowa - down 21.3%

Minnesota - down 10.8%

Wisconsin - down 24.8%

Illinois - down 24.7%

Michigan - down 25.1%

Indiana - down 12.4%

Ohio - down 28.1%

Pennsylvania - down 5.1%

Maryland - down 21.2%

New Jersey - down 18.4%

 

That's a lot fewer kids to pick from.

 

The southern states haven't had nearly as much decline:

 

Oklahoma - up 15.0%

Texas - up 2.9%

Louisiana - up 56.7%

Mississippi - up 0.6%

Alabama - up 45.2%

Georgia - down 0.9%

Florida - down 0.2%

 

As if they needed any more help.  The full article can be seen here.

 

[JJ Husker]

I'm not planning to dig into their methodology but there is absolutely no way Alabama had a 45.2% increase or Louisiana 56.7% over the last ten years. I might look into it later but, on the surface, that tells me that maybe none of their numbers are extremely reliable.

[Mavric]

8 minutes ago, JJ Husker said:

I'm not planning to dig into their methodology but there is absolutely no way Alabama had a 45.2% increase or Louisiana 56.7% over the last ten years. I might look into it later but, on the surface, that tells me that maybe none of their numbers are extremely reliable.

 

I thought that was pretty odd as well.  But I haven't looked into it either.  

I thought it said the numbers came from the National High School Federation - the place that makes the rules for everyone.

[Mavric]

14 hours ago, JJ Husker said:

I'm not planning to dig into their methodology but there is absolutely no way Alabama had a 45.2% increase or Louisiana 56.7% over the last ten years. I might look into it later but, on the surface, that tells me that maybe none of their numbers are extremely reliable.

 

Seems odd but apparently it's legit - assuming the survey isn't totally screwed up somehow.

 

According to the NFHS 2008-2009 survey (page 489 in this link), Alabama had 22,283 football players and Louisiana had 12,520.

 

According to the NFHS 2018-2019 survey (page 8 in this link), Alabama had 32,366 football players and Louisiana had 19,629.

 

So their numbers check out.