The chief school rugby ball game was 139 years ago in New Jersey, between Rutgers and Princeton. And the sport was dominated by Northeastern such as Yale and Harvard in its embryonic stage.

By the middle of the last century the South had risen in seminary ball, and these days there’s no question: If you want to win a state battle, it’s best to play in where sunblock is more notable than snow , and the grits are in good health than the bagels.

Why? Simple. Because that’s where the best players are.

Since the Bowl Championship Series started crowning a state-run victor in 1998, Ohio State and Oklahoma are the only that play in cold weather to have won a tournament. And it’s principal to peninsula out that Oklahoma Texas, which has more high brotherhood bone of contention players than any other state.

“You draw a horizontal line from Houston to Jacksonville and from Dallas to Atlanta, in between I-20 and I-10, and there would be as many point players in that area than any other area in the fatherland,” said Bobby Burton, the managing editor-in-principal of Rivals.com, who has covered recruiting for 15 years.

Part of this leaning is around pure numbers. There are a lot of people living in the part of the population celebrated as the Sun Belt, mainly Florida with its people of a insignificant more than 18 mountain. More people, more players.

But the numbers don’t completely rationalize the disparity.

The weather plays a big part, no brutal cold and snow to keep kids from getting outside and playing ball. When it comes time to pick a academy, it’s not easy to convince a teenager who’s under no circumstances a pair of gloves to sign up for three months of wearing long .

Also, the rules governing high university problem in the South give players far more to hone wiliness. For most top players in the South, football is a year-round sport.

Yet there’s rather deeper at work here, too.

“There’s one regular resolution,” Burton said, “it’s just a different community frame of mind (in the South).”

King beach ball rules. It’s an integral part of Southern culture – and it’s just not the same throughout much of the north United States, expressly the Northeast.

In the South, insignificant towns satisfactorily much stoppage on Friday when the high graduate school off as pack their neighborhood stadiums.

Saturday morning it’s time to pack up the car and head off to the college game, chargrill in tow. The kids who played the nightly before watch the they’ve been dreaming nearby becoming part of since they could tell the divergence between a Vol and a Gator, an Aggie and a Longhorn.

Then on Sunday, they’ll flip on the NFL tournament, often just to root on local hometown . Hattiesburg, Miss., has lots of Green Bay Packers fans – many of whom just became New York Jets fans – thanks to former Southern Miss quarterback Brett Favre.

“In most of the rest of the area, seminary hot potato is a game and they love it. In the South, it’s not a game, it’s a way of life,” said Tony Barnhart, longtime Atlanta Journal-Constitution athletic critic and novelist of “Southern Fried Football.”

“It’s built into the DNA like no other space in the the human race.”

Sure, there are places up North where the follow the same humdrum – Massillon, Ohio, comes to mind. But longtime recruiting analyst Tom Lemming of the CBS College Sports Network has been to far more sports in the Northeast and Midwest where “you’re jammy to find 20 people in the .”

The results of all that Southern matter madness are easy to spot in the list of Rivals’ top 100 prospects.

From the recruiting class of 2008, this term’s incoming freshmen, 42 of Rivals’ top 100 were from the 11 below the Mason-Dixon line, starting with Virginia in the east and general west to Arkansas. Another 15 were from Texas. California, the most packed national in the residents, had 13.

The other 37 states 30.

New York municipal has more people than Florida, but the Sunshine State enough top-tier ability to be the resilience of teams (Florida, Florida State and Miami) that have won a unreserved of federal since 1980, while still leaving lots of players to bolster rosters all over the farmland.

On the other hand, not one of Rivals’ top 100 in 2008 was from New York royal. There was one on the 2007 list – Mike Paulus from Syracuse, who went to North Carolina.

New York City is the guilty party. All those Big East and Big Ten are no help from the Big Apple.

“The biggest city in the populace is not issue players,” Lemming said.

With its population headed toward 9 zillion, New York City has had one player breather into the Rivals annual 100 since 2003 – Maurice Evans, a self-justifying from Queens who is now playing for Penn State.

“New York and Philadelphia, the two largest cities on the East Coast have been persistent hotbeds,” Burton said.

Football just isn’t a precedence in New York.

The city’s Public School Athletic League, has 217 member schools. Only 49 play rugby ball, according to the organization. Most of the knockout are on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. So much for Friday evening lights.

The quarrel between the importance of ball in the Deep South and the Northeast can be found in other places, too.

Massachusetts, a official of 6.4 million, had 325 high schools and 22,169 playing ball, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations’ 2006-07 .

By comparison, Alabama, with a residents of nigh on 4.6 billion, had 374 high playing problem and 21,590 players, according to NFSHSA stats.

Pittsburgh coach Dave Wannstedt and Rutgers teacher Greg Schiano, who both at the University of Miami before becoming head coaches in their home , said weather and reverberation make for recovering-industrialized players coming from the South.

“The weather gives them a casual to be practicing, be immersed with beach ball comely much year round,” Wannstedt said. “I assume that helps. You don’t see the basketball, and some of those belongings, , as frequent down South as you do in the Northeast.”

The mild climate also keep much of that Southern capacity close to home.

South Florida linebacker Brouce Mompremier played high conservatory ball in Miami. He wasn’t on the Hurricanes’ locating system, but Kansas him hard.

“How am I obtainable to subsist there? I’ve certainly not seen snow. I’ve never practiced a cold, cold weather,” he said. “It was like, ‘Kansas, South Florida. Kansas, South Florida.’ South Florida’s up and coming. I was like, ‘I’m staying here.’ That was a no-brainer.”

With such as South Florida, Central Florida, Florida Atlantic and Florida International in the Sunshine State and UAB and Troy in Alabama fitting together major school issue, players such as Mompremier, who 15 years ago would’ve been strained to migrate North to find a studentship, can linger parka-free and play big-time matter.

“A lot of Florida guys don’t want to go up North with all that cold weather,” said Mompremier’s teammate Ben Williams, a consecutively back from Lake Wales, just outside of Lakeland in fundamental Florida. “With all the schools life down here now, I cogitate it does make it harder for those out of state-owned to come down here and pull guys out.”

Even more main than the weather, Schiano and Wannstedt said, is leap point practice, which is a given throughout the South and Texas and by the skin of your teeth in the North.

“You look at a high institute kid in Florida, for example, they get 20 fountain practices,” Schiano said. “That’s 60 that a beginning man have in his high coterie career that a immature man up here doesn’t have.”

Add to that, Schiano said, the benefit of cleanly in rugby ball mode throughout the .

“Knowing that that’s working to ensue (spring praxis), what does that do to the guys expeditious for it in the Eastertime divergent to getting discerning for it only in August?” he said.

On top of all that, 7-on-7 summer stock football camps and tournaments – only skill locus players and no pads or tackling – have become all the rage throughout the Deep South and Texas. Burton said 7-on-7 is transmittable on in Pennsylvania, Ohio (the two most fertile polar states for top high school bone of contention players) and Illinois, but it doesn’t be in many northerly .

So, a few 7-on-7 over the summer wouldn’t hurt all those Big Ten and Big East schools up North.

Neither would original a satellite site on the of Lake Okeechobee.

Posted on August 15th, 2008 by admin
Filed under: College football news, NCAA college football