Is Eden Prairie a pipeline out of state?

I mentioned this in the CDH discussion but I thought it deserved it's own thread. In the last 5 years EP has sent seven players to play DI football. Minnesota offered a scholarship to all seven players but the only two to commit to Minnesota held a combined 0 offers from out of state schools. So I ask the question, is Eden Prairie a pipeline out of the state of Minnesota?

2009
Corey Frazier held Minnesota offer committed to Rice.
2008
Willie Mobley held Minnesota offer committed to OSU.
Ryan Grant committed to Minnesota w/ no outside offers.
2007
Ryan Orton committed to Minnesota w/ no outside offers.
Blake Sorenson held Minnesota offer committed to Wisconsin.
Bryce McNaul held Minnesota offer committed to Northwestern.
2006
None
2005
Walker Ashley held Minnesota offer committed to USC.

It does look a lot like CDH's track record. In the end it all comes down to individual choices and recruiting but it is tough to ignore trends like this as ONLY being a coincidence.

the U won't consistently land these guys until they prove they can win.

Schnauzer said:

It does look a lot like CDH's track record. In the end it all comes down to individual choices and recruiting but it is tough to ignore trends like this as ONLY being a coincidence.

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That is the point I was trying to make in the other thread but it somehow got ignored. We could go back further but in the last 10 years Minnesota has done a very poor job of retaining top talent--regardless of public or private school. The only thing unique about CDH (and EP which is why I chose them) is that they have had more top talent than other schools. The fact that you can see the results it at both a public and a private indicates that the causation of the correlation at CDH is not a matter of it being a private school.

Under BA Wisconsin locked down their top talent which helped elevate them to a top half of the Big Ten team and one part of the recipe for Minnesota to get there is to do the same thing. The 2009 class was the best we have done locking down the borders since I remember (I was born in 1980 and I've been a Gopher fan since I can remember). We're making strides but it doesn't happen overnight.

theTurning said:

the U won't consistently land these guys until they prove they can win.

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Exactly. We're making strides in keeping them at home (all but McNeal last year) but it doesn't happen overnight. To get Gjere--the #49 ranked player according to Rivals--to commit this early is a big step in that direction. Henderson would be huge but if he doesn't commit Gjere is still the highest ranked HS prospect we've landed since the modern era of recruiting websites.

Sorenson and McNaul had no offer from Mase. They were committed before Brew took over.

dlw4gophers said:

Sorenson and McNaul had no offer from Mase. They were committed before Brew took over.

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They both ended up getting offers so the point is the same. They had the ability to decommit and choose the Gophers and neither did. Wisconsin fans expect their players (Zagzebski, Nortmann) to decommit if they get a Badger offer and we have to get to that point.

Schnauzer said:

It does look a lot like CDH's track record. In the end it all comes down to individual choices and recruiting but it is tough to ignore trends like this as ONLY being a coincidence.

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But wouldn't those guys decision to attend school in their own district make them more likely to go to the U?



















sorry I couldn't help it

I was going to start my own thread regarding this topic when I logged in tonight, but I will just piggyback on yours.

From 2003-2009 (since that is the time frame in which Rivals had the available data), this is how our in-state recruiting has fared. These include all Minnesota prospects who received an offer from the Gophers:

CDH 3/11 (27.3%)
EP 3/8 (37.5%)
other 35/51 (68.6%)

This is probably the point at which you're saying, "A lot of those other guys only went to the U because they didn't have any other choice." Eliminating Gophers signees who didn't receive any other D-IA offers removes 19 players from the "other" pool, but it doesn't affect it nearly as negatively as the two powerhouse schools:

CDH 2/10 (20.0%) (Nance being the only CDH recruit with no other D-IA offers)
EP 0/5 (0.0%) (Mullaney, Orton, R. Grant)
other 17/32 (53.1%)

This shows some very disturbing trends. When given the opportunity to play "FBS" (I really hate calling it that) football somewhere else, Cretin-Derham Hall athletes choose to do so 80% of the time, and Eden Prairie players do 100% of the time. The numbers show that we have had a better than 50/50 chance with all other in-state players, so even meeting halfway at 25% at those schools would have given us another 1-2 CDH recruits, and 1-2 EP recruits. This is especially troubling considering that these 2 schools produced, by themselves, 1/4 of the in-state recruits to receive offers over the last 7 years.

I have no idea why these two schools have a trend of sending hardly any of their football players to the U over the last few years. But it is something that Brewster and his staff must recognize if they want to stop the out-of-state pipelines.

theTurning said:

the U won't consistently land these guys until they prove they can win.

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That's backward.

The U won't consistently win until the top in state players decide to stay at home and build Minnesota into something special. Out of state recruiting is hard for anyone, let alone Minnesota, and we don't have enough good in state players to lose many of them and still be a great program.

I thought Mason's arrogance and laziness is why

none of these players went to Minnesota.

Brewster tried to play the game Mason refused to and wasted scholarships on Grant and a couple of others and what did that get him? M. Floyd???

I do hope Brewster stops pandering to these spoiled kids and goes to Texas, Florida, and elsewhere to get players who are better than the EP/ CDH prima donnas, M. Floyd excepted.

No Gopher fan should care where these guys come from if they can play and are eligible.

grunkiejr said:

Under BA Wisconsin locked down their top talent which helped elevate them to a top half of the Big Ten team and one part of the recipe for Minnesota to get there is to do the same thing. The 2009 class was the best we have done locking down the borders since I remember (I was born in 1980 and I've been a Gopher fan since I can remember). We're making strides but it doesn't happen overnight.

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Alvarez was interviewed on the ESPN 50 state stop in Madison and he cited turning around in-state recruiting as a big reason the program got better. He talked about looking around when he got there and seeing big parts of the Iowa lines coming from WI. He also indicated that you have to design your team around the local consistently available talent, which is why Wisconsin has been such a big running team through the years. I suspect the formula for the U will be the same (Murtha, Carufel, Gjere, Henderson, ...).

oak_street1981 said:

No Gopher fan should care where these guys come from if they can play and are eligible.

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As long as the Gophers are successful, I couldn't care less where the players come from. But I don't think it's very realistic to have success without a strong local recruiting base. What programs have done well in recruiting without it? Tennessee? Notre Dame? You will note that while these schools generally recruit well, neither has accomplished anything in over a decade. I don't think that's a coincidence.

I wasn't really trying to pick on EP but rather just trying illustrate the point that people trying to explain why CDH may have a high rate of players leaving the state are missing the forest from the trees. People like to classify by school because it is easy instead of looking deeper at the data and asking what is different about these players than other players.

If you look at Minnesota recruiting in the last 10 years we had much more success recruiting the #4-#10 ranked player in the state than the #1-#3 ranked player regardless of school.

What I think is unique about CDH is that their top players seem to have a higher likelihood of being elite--4* or higher and a top 3 player in the state than other schools. That means that guys like Carufel, Floyd, Henderson, etc are not just a good player that gets an offer from out-of-state programs but they are a recruit that the other programs focus on trying to land and therefore they get much more attention.