Wall Street Journal finds FSU blows away the competition

By Charlie Barnes, Executive Director - Seminole Boosters

You gotta love New York City.

And we do. We love the brash American metropolis proclaiming itself to be the greatest city in the world. Modesty has long eluded New York, but as we say down here, “It ain’t bragging if you can back it up.”

Down here, of course, things are different, especially as regards college football. Gotham is not exactly a college football Mecca. New Yorkers never refer to themselves as the “Knoxville of the North” or some such.

Some New York City sportswriters think about college football much the same way as some football fans down here think of soccer. That is, “It’s probably an interesting game if you could understand it, and the thing really does seem to rile up the natives.” Yes, we natives down here do tend to get riled up about our Saturdays in the fall.

All of which brings us to the most recent, wonderful article in the Wall Street Journal about Florida State University. With too much time on his hands and with access to a calculator, Journal senior sportswriter Sam Walker uncovered a secret. Until its publication on Aug. 18, it was a secret known only to those college football fans who live — well, who live everywhere actually, everyplace other than Manhattan.

Upon a painfully convoluted and meticulous assessment of NFL players from 250 colleges and universities, a process that involved matching mothers’ maiden names with phases of the moon and calculating “alumni success points,” the Journal presented what it called the “Dow-Jones College Football Success Index.”

And whose stock do you think had the highest value? Here, let Walker tell you: “With 45 players taking the field in the NFL last season and more than 25 starting regularly for some of the league’s best teams, Florida State came out on top. In fact, they blew away the next best school by a wide margin.”

It’s been a while since the last truly spectacular Seminole recruiting piece appeared in anational publication. In 2000, ESPN Magazine trumpeted the virtues of FSU in a marvelous front page feature headlined “The Cool School.” ESPN felt Florida State had the best record, the fastest players, the most imposing chant, the coolest uniforms, the funniest coach and the prettiest girls. Why would any talented, smart and ambitious young man want to play anywhere other than for the best program on the South’s most glamorous campus? Who are we to argue?

The Wall Street Journal print piece was introduced with a very large artist’s depiction of a generic Seminole running back in full stride — his uniform of gorgeous colors — being measured by all sorts of mechanical calipers. The headline is: “The Real No. 1.” It’s enough to make every true Seminole fan feel that the time of return to dynasty is at hand.

The “secret” that Walker uncovered is that Florida is the center of the college football talent universe. Walker’s system is highly complex, but reasonable and well thought out. He assembled an exhaustive index of details on NFL players and discounted the data for anomalies (for instance, “all kickers are listed as substitutes” — fine by me).

The resulting scorecard has Florida State at the top of the list, followed by Florida and Miami. The Hurricanes actually only rank No. 7, but with the explanation that injuries to several of their first-round draft picks lowered the overall score.

Some interesting but not surprising pictures emerge from Walker’s research. An obvious, overwhelming concentration of talent in the major conferences is to be expected, but is still striking. Excepting Notre Dame, all of the Top 30 schools are to be found in one or another of only five football conferences. The Big 10, the Pac-10, the Big 12 and the SEC boast six teams each.

The ACC has five teams, and to give you an idea of the impact Florida State has had on the fortunes of the ACC, three of the five are FSU, plus two schools recruited by the Seminoles: Miami and Virginia Tech.

Another interesting point: Eight of the Top 10 are Deep South schools. However, no Southern school appears in the rankings between 11 and 20, unless you want to count Texas and Texas A&M as “Southern.” Texans tend to think of themselves as a separate outfit altogether.

In any case, players from his list of Top 10 schools “account for more than one-fifth of all alumni success points earned in the NFL last year.” The Top 30 from among 250 schools accounted for fully half of all those alumni success points.

The truth is that Walker is a brilliant writer who has obviously come to the right conclusion about our Seminoles.

And the truth is that New York City has always been kind to the Seminoles, from the Heisman ceremonies at the Downtown Athletic Club to the induction this fall at the Waldorf-Astoria of Bobby Bowden and Charlie Ward into the College Football Hall of Fame. As you know, Bowden and Joe Paterno are the first and only two candidates to be inducted while they are still active players on the stage.

And the truth is New York is the greatest city, as advertised. And Florida State is still at the top of the pyramid of American college football.