I’m well aware of the history of talent from western PA, Ohio, northern W.Va, northern Indiana and western NYS. I’ve written about it on this board multiple times, especially the many outstanding contributions to UM football from those areas going all the way back to the 1950’s. It didn’t start with Kelly, Kosar, Dennison, etc. I also forgot to mention western upstate Maryland, where we used to recruit from the powerhouse area of Cumberland—now a sleepy small town. Some of the Univ. of Maryland powerhouses of the mid-50’s (incl. one NC as I recall) were built on Cumberland kids.
It’s not the collapse of the steel mills that have changed the talent levels. We used to recruit tough working-class white kids from those areas. Football has changed. It’s overwhelmingly a game based on speed, not just power. You cannot get that in abundance in western Pennsylvania. It means the talent has shifted to the south, especially Florida. It’s overwhelmingly a sport dominated by African-Americans, not PoItalians, Irish, etc. kids who predominated in the working class towns of western Pennsylvania. Those were the kids whose families worked in the steel mills or coal mines.
When I was a kid growing up in Florida in the early ‘60’s, I would know the names of so many small western Pennsylvania towns because I knew the entire UM roster top to bottom. We would have 20-30 western Pennsylvania boys on a typical roster.
And every year UM fans would lament that we always lacked fast breakaway backs (as that term was widely used back then). In the mid 60’s we got Vince Opalsky from Pennsylvania (as I recall). He never had the kind of career we hoped he would. I think he was hurt a lot. He was big and fast.
