What is going on with high school football here in the great commonwealth of Pennsylvania?

Before we get to that, let’s first acknowledge the outstanding history that Pennsylvania has played in the game of football in this country.

The Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, has 378 individuals enshrined as the finest the game has produced. According to the data on their website, by my count 34 of those individuals attended high school in Pennsylvania. 9% of the members of the Pro Football Hall of Fame come from a state that comprises only 3.9% of the population of the country.

Granted, those 34 individuals include an owner or two, such as Dan Rooney. But they also include such all-time great quarterbacks as Johnny Unitas, Joe Namath, Joe Montana, Dan Marino and Jim Kelly — coincidentally, none of whom played their college football at Penn State.

But, of the six Penn State football players who later went on to be enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame – Jack Ham, Franco Harris, Mike Michalske, Lenny Moore, Mike Munchak, and Dave Robinson – three, or half, played their high school football in state: Ham, Moore and Munchak.

In addition to Pennsylvania’s presence in the Hall of Fame, the Pittsburgh Steelers are tied with the New England Patriots – with six – for the most all-time Super Bowl victories. If you add in the Eagles’ Super Bowl win in 2017, the state of Pennsylvania has seven Super Bowl wins, which is second-most of any state, behind California with nine (between Rams, 49ers and Raiders).

Meaning Pennsylvania has some serious football credibility in this country.

But, to get back to my initial question, what got me thinking about the state (pun intended) of Pennsylvania high school football was a recent column on these pages by Mike Poorman.

In it, Mike noted that during the Penn State football team’s winter-workout-ending Max Out Day last week, Penn State strength coach Chuck Losey, “singled out three Pennsylvania products for their leadership during winter workouts.” Those three Pennsylvania products are linebacker Dom DeLuca, center Nick Dawkins and wide receiver Julian Fleming.

The thing that got me thinking was the singling out of “three Pennsylvania products.” Why would that need to be stated? I mean, isn’t this the Pennsylvania State University where 57% of the students at University Park are Pennsylvanians? “Dominate the state” and all that?

If so, wouldn’t Pennsylvania products on the football team being singled out be the norm?

That was the question that led me in search of Penn State’s football roster.

I studied the roster for a bit, and there are (at the time I counted) 126 student-athletes on the football team. Of those, 48 listed a “Hometown / High School” from Pennsylvania. That’s only 38% of the roster. At a school where more than half the students are Pennsylvanians, just more than a third of the football team are Pennsylvanians.

As I looked more closely at the names of those Pennsylvania players, some were very familiar. The aforementioned three, for example, and others such as Beau Pribula, Nick Singleton and Abdul Carter. Yet there were a number of names that weren’t familiar at all, which is not unusual with a roster of 126 players when only 30-40 are playing regularly.

So, I went in search of the scholarship players – the ones you would expect to be playing, or whose names had been publicized during their recruitment. Except, Penn State doesn’t publish an official list of which players are on scholarship and which aren’t. So, I found an online list produced by Rivals.com’s Happy Valley Insider.

According to that “unofficial” list, and cross-referencing it with Penn State’s online roster, there are 88 scholarships currently distributed among the players – which we know will be down to 85 when the season starts. Of those 88, only 24 are Pennsylvanians. A mere 27% of the scholarship players are from the commonwealth.

Well, that seems odd, doesn’t it? Or, was this always the case? Rosters of older Penn State football teams are hard to find online, so I went to my trusty Beaver Stadium program from the first game I ever attended – the Sept. 30, 1972 game against Iowa (see image below). The 1972 varsity roster shows 82 players on the team – freshmen were ineligible to play back then. Of those, 48 were Pennsylvanians — 59% of the roster. Of course, this was back in the days when a number of those Pro Football Hall of Famers from Pennsylvania were playing. As they say, it seems the in-state pickings were good back then.

So, why is the flagship public state university of the fifth-most populous state in the country barely able to fill out a quarter of its football roster with in-state scholarship players? Maybe the high schools are the issue?

In that case, let’s look at the recruits. Using 247Sports online recruiting rankings – which go back as far as 1999 – of the top 200 recruits for 2024 across the entire country, only three are from Pennsylvania (two committed to Penn State). If you go back a decade to 2014, there were only two Pennsylvania kids in the top 200 nationwide (neither went to Penn State). However, if we go back another decade to 2004, there were nine Pennsylvania players in the top 200 (three went to Penn State).

Why the scarcity of top recruits from our great state the last few decades? We still hold 3.9% of the country’s population – shouldn’t we have close to 3.9% of the top 200 recruits every year (seven or eight)? Or, do the recruiting services have a grudge against Pennsylvania and just not rate PA kids highly? Or, have the high school football coaches in the state just somehow forgotten how to develop young players?

Or, maybe there is another answer as to why Penn State football can only fill a quarter of their scholarships with in-state kids?

The National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS) is the nation’s leader for high school athletics and author of the playing rules for many high school sports. Since 1969 they have compiled participation surveys of all high school sports across the country by sport, state and gender. If we start with the most recent survey – the 2022-23 season – and go back every 10 years, the chart below shows some interesting numbers as far as participation in football in this commonwealth are concerned (there were no 1972-73 stats, so I used 1971-72).

In the early 1970s, Pennsylvania was the third-largest producer of high school football players in the country. But by the early 1980s it had fallen to sixth place. By the early ‘90s it was only the ninth-largest producer, and ever since then it has never cracked the top 10. As of the 2022-23 season, there were 1,028,761 young men playing 11-man football in this country. Only 24,975, that’s 2.4%, were in Pennsylvania.

Compare that to the 1971-72 season when there were 878,187 young men playing 11-man football in this country, and Pennsylvania was responsible for 72,320 of them. That’s 8.2%, more than three times the percentage that Pennsylvania produces today and almost three times as many players.

Maybe that’s what’s going on with high school football in the commonwealth. Maybe it’s not an issue of quality, but a simple issue of quantity. For whatever reason, high school football in Pennsylvania is just not as popular as it was decades ago. And consequently, that’s why the Penn State football team is primarily made up of scholarship players from out-of-state, and why singling out three Pennsylvania products is an exception and not the norm.

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