“Nothing succeeds like success”
Alexandre Dumas
There are lots of things going on in the world today and many of them are ominous or at least not good. I choose to ignore those and to instead comment on the world of NCAA College Football. Let me preface these remarks by saying I have been a Gopher fan since the days of Sandy Stephens and Judge Dickson. I knew about the Golden Gopher football team before I even realized there was a learning institution that was attached to it. Ahh, those were the Glory Days – SOOOOO long ago. Oh, not that there haven’t been a few fleeting minutes of joy since then. I confess I am not a season ticket holder. But there have been very few seasons where we haven’t attended two to three games in person and watched/listened to the balance of the games. It has been an exercise marked by heartache and frustration. For after those glory years of the early 60’s and one shared title (with two others) in 1967, my Beloved Little Rodents have been shut out of the Big Ten title. And after attending last week’s debacle with Illinois and watching the disappointing loss to Iowa Saturday it is now clear that 2021 won’t be the year to break that string either.
But really what did we expect? There are “haves” and “have-nots” in college football, and we certainly are not one of the “haves.” Ohh when you listen to the Big Ten Network commentators one would think that this is a wide-open competition year-in and year-out. And I am certainly not a statistician but even a sewer engineer can look at who has won or tied for the Big Ten title over the last fifty years. I did that little exercise and found that Ohio State has won or shared the title twenty-five times and Michigan twenty times. Their nearest competitors are Wisconsin (six), Iowa (five) and Michigan State (five). All others combined have ten. So, I think the math is that OSU has as many titles as all other Big Ten teams not named Michigan combined. Michigan and OSU together have almost twice as many titles as all others combined. Its not the Big Ten, it’s the Big Two and the Little Twelve. How can this be? Wouldn’t you think in fifty years our Gophers could muster a team to compete with the Big Two?
To explain this phenomenon, as with all dilemmas, I harkened back to the source of all my wisdom, my days growing up on the farm. One of my fondest memories is when we gathered with my dad and my Uncle Louis to bale hay. Rather than pay the exorbitant fee charged by other farmers who already had a hay baler, my Pop and my uncle pooled their resources and purchased an International Harvester model 50T baler. The 50T had a nasty habit of not correctly tying about every third bale, which in turn lead to unbaled chunks of hay littering the field and streams of profanity from its owners. In fact, if my uncle and my dad are not in heaven (which I know they are) it would be because of that damn 50T baler. But one thing that DID work on the 50T was the flywheel. This was a massive piece of metal that kept rotating and kept the baler running smoothly even if the inadvertent large windrow of hay brought too much material into the baling chamber. The tremendous weight of that huge metal wheel just kept that machine going, on and on regardless of what it ran into. It sustained the ongoing power of the machine.
The Alabama’s, the Ohio State’s, the Georgia’s of the college football world have huge flywheels. They are sustained every year through massive athletic departments funded by massive donations from supporters and massive ticket and merchandising income. But the biggest flywheel they have is that they win consistently. NCAA football is fundamentally different than the National Football League (NFL). When you finish first in the NFL you get the lowest draft picks. Your incoming players are by design less capable than those available to the team that finished LAST in the league. That last place team gets the FIRST pick of the available players. This is all designed to create parity in the league and for the most part it has worked (well maybe except for the Bears). College football is the opposite. If you finish last in the league none of the elite incoming freshmen want to join your program. The college football have-nots have no flywheel, and it is REALLY hard to get one if you don’t already have one. It is much easier to keep one going once you have it spinning.
This was my hypothesis. Just to check myself out a little bit I visited two websites – one listing information on the 2021 recruiting class for OSU and one listing information on the 2021 recruiting class for our beloved Gophers. Based on what I read in our local and national sports publications the Minnesota class was one of its best in years. How did it stack up against OSU? College sports and all the businesses that revolve around it are an industry. High school football player rating agencies are part of that industry. The three largest of the rating agencies are 247 Sports, Rivals and ESPN. They sometimes differ slightly in how they rate incoming freshmen but not all that much. They use a “star system,” assigning each player a star rating ranging from one to five – five being the best. The 247 Sports rating agency said there were thirty-one five-star recruits in the nation for the 2021 class. OSU was able to secure five of those players. Of the twenty-one players in their incoming class, five were five-star, thirteen were four-star and three were three-star players. Of the eighteen players in the Minnesota class, NONE were five-star, four were four-star and fourteen were three-star players. Do you kinda see how this works? OSU has a LOT bigger flywheel than Minnesota, yet they play in the same league.
Fortunately, football games are not computer model exercises and sometimes those two and three and four-star football players rise and give those five-star laden teams a tussle, but truthfully not very often (see the data on the Big Ten championships). Well, if things are so discouraging why do I shell out big bucks each year to go down to the games? And why do I agonize and curse and rage during each game you watch on TV? Ummm because its’ fun? Actually, it IS fun. We get to go down and see the band and the spirit squad and good old Goldy. We sing the Rouser and Hail Minnesota with gusto usually until the third quarter when we are far behind. And there is the sting of the losses, but that goes away – after a while. And then we wistfully dream of next year – those incoming freshmen really DO look good. Just wait until next year – we are going to win back Floyd of Rosedale, and the Axe, and the Little Brown Jug and we are going to go the Rose Bowl!!!! But it looks like the Pin Stripe Bowl for us again this year.
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Not enough people appreciate the effectiveness of flywheels. Heck, you used to start the old John Deeres by spinning them. I encountered an interesting modern use when we were working with the company that built the data center on Lexington Avenue in Eagan. They did a number of things using physics as their friend, like putting all of the cooling equipment on the roof because cold air wants to fall anyway, but the one that was most fascinating to me was their Uninterrupted Power System system. Like most companies that rely on continuous electrical capacity, they had a bank of diesel generators that would automatically start if they sensed a dip in the utility’s power. As we all know, though, spooling up a diesel engine and its power generating system takes time. Most companies use a room full of batteries to fill the gap from the utility power loss to the generator taking over. This company used a bank of flywheels that were constantly spinning. When they sensed the dip in power, the flywheels kept spinning and the generators attached provided a constant electricity level until they handed the feed off to the generators. Then they kept spinning until the next time they were needed. Pop and your uncle might have been impressed.