Returning Letter Winners - Minnesota vs. the rest of the B1G

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Lakeville Goldy

Lakeville Goldy

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I was looking at the 2017 B1G Football Prospectus http://grfx.cstv.com/photos/schools...-18/misc_non_event/2017FootballProspectus.pdf and saw that all teams except Michigan State reported how many letter winners they retained and lost from last year. There's been a lot of talk on Gopherhole about how all teams lose players and are the Gophers really any worse than any other team, so I decided to put the numbers together in a table.

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Obviously I have no way of knowing how letter winners are determined, etc. I'm just using the numbers reported.

The Gophers have the second worst percentage of returning lettermen in the B1G ahead of Illinois. However, they are only one standard deviation below the average (you'd expect ~1/6 of the teams to be one standard deviation below or more), so not like it's way outside of an expected range.

The teams that surprised me are Michigan (didn't they lose like 18 starters?), Wisconsin and Indiana.

So yes, the Gophers have lost a higher percentage of lettermen than any other school besides Illinois, but it's not like they're returning less than 50% or something. Probably not as bad as I was expecting.

PS. Sorry about having to post a picture of the table but I couldn't figure out how to cut and paste out of Excel into the table tool...
 

I think the better question is how many starters are returning. Letter winning criteria vary by school and a lot of kids get letters for ST participation, which is important but not as important as returning oline, dline and QB starters in my opinion. Given that most teams substitute a lot more than they used to, there are a lot of letter winners on most teams.
I believe Michigan lost a lot of their defense, but it does not mean they don't have letter winners to replace them. I doubt most of them are as good as last year's starters, or will be at the start the season.
 

Doesn't matter. We had a DB drafted this year and none are projected at this time to be drafted next year.


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Spoofin said:
Doesn't matter. We had a DB drafted this year and none are projected at this time to be drafted next year.


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That was a Hell of a run tho. In terms of consecutive years w a db drafted, Third I think only to Ohio state and VA Tech I think I read somewhere. Credit Jay Sawvel. Miss that dude...
 

JTsolo612 said:
That was a Hell of a run tho. In terms of consecutive years w a db drafted, Third I think only to Ohio state and VA Tech I think I read somewhere. Credit Jay Sawvel. Miss that dude...
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Maybe AWjr will leave early and keep the streak going....


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Spoofin said:
Maybe AWjr will leave early and keep the streak going....


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Yeah... but I kinda don't want him to. That kid is a beast and we need him. I guess the streak was nice while it lasted. But with a different staff in place I don't know if it would help in recruiting at all. Kids know that it wasn't the current staff putting DBs in the NFL. Just like WRs know PJ helped get homeboy picked #5 overall.


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dpodoll68 said:
Not sure if serious, but he couldn't leave for the NFL after this season even if he wanted to.
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Gotcha. Too young. I certainly didn't want him to leave anyway.


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corcoran1 said:
I think the better question is how many starters are returning. Letter winning criteria vary by school and a lot of kids get letters for ST participation, which is important but not as important as returning oline, dline and QB starters in my opinion. Given that most teams substitute a lot more than they used to, there are a lot of letter winners on most teams.
I believe Michigan lost a lot of their defense, but it does not mean they don't have letter winners to replace them. I doubt most of them are as good as last year's starters, or will be at the start the season.
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Agreed, but the information they had on that was pretty limited. For example, they show the Gophers losing starting center Matt Leidner, but don't mention Tyler Moore. They also don't mention any of the players that were expelled.

Odd thing - they show Coney Durr as both returning and lost. I kind of panicked when I saw he wasn't returning, but then happened to see him also returning.

Letterwinners Returning: 43
Offense: 18
Defense: 21
Special Teams: 4

Offensive Starters Returning (7)
LT Donnell Greene
LG Garrison Wright
RB Rodney Smith
RB Shannon Brooks
TE Nate Wozniak
TE Colton Beebe
WR Rashad Still

Defensive Starters Returning (6)
DT Steven Richardson
LB Jonathan Celestin
LB Blake Cashman
S Adekunle Ayinde
S Duke McGhee
CB Coney Durr

Starting Kickers Returning (2)
K Emmit Carpenter
P Ryan Santoso

Letterwinners Lost: 28
Offense: 12
Defense: 15
Special Teams: 1

Offensive Starters Lost (4)
C Matt Leidner
RG Connor Mayes
RT Jonah Pirsig
QB Mitch Leidner

Defensive Starters Lost (5)
DE Hendrick Ekpe
DT Scott Ekpe
LB Jack Lynn
CB Jalen Myrick
CB Coney Durr

Starting Kickers Lost (0)
None
 



corcoran1 said:
I think the better question is how many starters are returning. Letter winning criteria vary by school and a lot of kids get letters for ST participation, which is important but not as important as returning oline, dline and QB starters in my opinion. Given that most teams substitute a lot more than they used to, there are a lot of letter winners on most teams.
I believe Michigan lost a lot of their defense, but it does not mean they don't have letter winners to replace them. I doubt most of them are as good as last year's starters, or will be at the start the season.
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IMO starters doesn't tell much of a story either. Years ago your starters were your starters. Now you have packages, platoons, etc. And what if an opening day starter gets beat out or is injured. Is he considered a starter, or the new guy? There isn't a clean and accurate way to determine. Letters at least gets into depth, although it's not perfect either.
 


Section2 said:
IMO starters doesn't tell much of a story either. Years ago your starters were your starters. Now you have packages, platoons, etc. And what if an opening day starter gets beat out or is injured. Is he considered a starter, or the new guy? There isn't a clean and accurate way to determine. Letters at least gets into depth, although it's not perfect either.
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Yeah, probably the best would be to sort by playing time and take the top 11 on offense and defense, but I am certainly not going to spend the time to find that. :)

A_Slab_of_Bacon said:
Yeah I mean Purdue has starters.... not sure anyone wants many of them.
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Agreed, but would you say Purdue would be better off if they lose 80% of their starters? Just because a starter isn't good, losing them doesn't better the team unless the replacement ends up being better. More often then not the player coming in didn't beat out the guy in front of them. Sometimes that year difference is huge and the player becomes a great player, other times it's a disappointment.

My intent with this was simply to use a number that was readily available to see how the Gophers compared to the rest of the B1G. Some folks were claiming the Gophers were decimated, some were claiming it was normal, and in truth the answer is a little in between. They lost more than average but they would not be considered a statistical outlier. I just thought it was interesting data.
 

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