While reading up on football on Wikipedia, it is mentioned that 1.1 million students participate in the sport, but only 70000 college students play it. These wildly differing figures made me go look at the source of the claims. Here it is
It goes on to further break it down by total high schools with football teams, about 14000.
So this means that there are 78 players per team, on average. How can this be? I thought that there were 40-50 players per team. What’s the explanation for this seemingly inflated number?
You’re assuming one team per school. Is that reasonable? Perhaps schools have more than one team. My relatively small school played rugby, and we had about 15 teams.
There are often both varsity and junior varsity football teams, with the junior varsity teams often playing their own schedule. Some high schools pretty much allow anyone to play football who wants to. At my high school, one year there were only a total of 150 male students in all four years of high school. 105 of them played on either the varsity or the junior varsity football team.
Cunctator, I’m pretty sure that The Niply Elder is talking about the school football team that plays other high schools. I assume that you’re talking about having 15 rugby teams among the students in the high school where those teams play each other, not teams from other high schools. That’s not typical in the U.S.
Most high schools have an A team and a B team. The A team, mostly upperclassmen, play the regular interscholastic conference schedule, and the B team, mostly underclassmen, play a limited season. As players from the A team graduate, they get replaced next year by those advancing from the B team, so there is always a supply of trained, experience players to move up…
This is especially common in basketball, whose traveling squads typically carry less than 15 players. Even if there is no B team as such, the school will typically have about 75 boys on the football practice roster, even though only about 30-40 will suit up for a game. When I was in high school, nobody was cut, everyone who signed up for a sport was carried and showed up for practice, but not all would be on the game roster.
Thanks for the explanation, Cunctator. Still, that doesn’t happen in the U.S. Sometimes there will be several levels of team for some sports, called something like the varsity/junior varsity/freshman or the A/B teams, where one team is the main team for the sport that everyone in the school district is really concerned with and the other levels of team will just be training for the main team, occasionally playing other school’s lower-level teams. There is never (I think) cases in the U.S. where many teams in one sport from one school each play other school’s teams and are considered to be the major team for the sport for that school.
To confuse things even more, some high schools, like the one a cousin of mine attended, only had 14 players total on the football team. They played 8 man football and made it to the state championship game. There were no JV or freshman teams at that school. The whole school only had about 75 students K through 12. There is also 6 man football in some states that have small schools.
My High School had Varsity, Jr Varsity and a B Team. The B Team played other B Teams and was little guys who were too small to ever play Varsity football. There may have been a height and weight limit to play as a B.
IME, though, the numbers sound pretty reasonable. For every Podunk high playing 8-man, there’s a big one with 60 kids on varsity, and another 60 on the freshman team, and 80 on the JV because they have a “no cut” policy.
The fastest growing category of HS football in Michigan is 8-man. Turnout is down 6% over the past couple of years and some of the smaller schools are no longer able to field 11-man teams.
Our senior teams were called the First XV, Second XV and Third XV (there being 15 players in a rugby team). The younger teams were the 16As, 16Bs, 16Cs, 15As, 15Bs…etc right down to the 12Cs in order of age.
And we were a small school. The bigger schools had teams in each age group that went to D, E, F, G…
Ok so this is interesting, but let me ask further: if there are 30-40 people in the A team and a further 30-40 people in the B team, it seems like there’s three substitutes for every player in the field. This is enough to put together 7ish whole teams from the roster. How many players actually play under these circumstances? The source numbers come from a survey of high schools that belong to any inter scholastic sport league, so I don’t doubt the veracity of the reported participation rates. However, I’m interested in knowing how many actually play football. Do people even get playtime?
I ask because it seems to me like the popularity of football in the US is vastly exaggerated. I haven’t met a person who has played. When I ask the most rabid football fans when was the last time they played, they have no answer. It’s mostly just throwing the football 20 yards to a buddy and nothing else. Extremely rarely will I find a person who has played flag football. Could it be reasonable to say that the true number of players in Highschool who actively participate be in the 100-200k range instead of the 1.1 million written down on the roster?
Depending on the size of school and cut policy, you could have the majority of the team never/rarely play. Which is alright with them, they’re on the team for the status.
A lot of times the good ones play both offense and defense, and even special teams, thereby lowering the playing times even further for the marginal players, although coaches do typically try to give the lower skilled players time on the field, they just rotate them through a lot. Or they keep them on jv. Our school has about 500 kids, roughly 75 play on one of the three teams.
I wouldn’t be surprised that the 1M number is accurate. Some of it’s regional, some of it is by the school. There are very few schools in mn that don’t have a football team.
As to adults playing, it’s not as easy as basketball or tennis to arrange pick up games. You need art last twenty guys, a large field, refs, and possibly equipment.
I know my husband played a little after high school/college at some local Podunk league, but the specifics are hazy. I don’t think they had on pads, so maybe it was touch?
As to percentage of men that have played at least at the high school level, around here it’s pretty high. A smaller percentage played college, but I can think of at least 25/30 that played at the college level, though not necessarily at division 1. As far as pros, I personally know 6 off the top of my head, and if I thought about it, I’m sure there’s more. My next door neighbor quarterbacked some European team for quite a while, fathered a daughter over there. Another pretty famous pro quarterback has kids that go to the same school as mine. Nice guy, really good kids.
The one million number is accurate,according to the National Federation of State High School Associations. That link is to a pdf, in case that matters.