National Football League

Big Ten: Conference Success Based on Amount of NFL Players?

Published Jun. 30, 2017 6:28 p.m. ET

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As I watched opening day of the NFL this past Sunday I got to see some former Big Ten players tear up the field.

The Big Ten sends a lot of players to the NFL, including some from my beloved Illinois Fighting Illini.

But, I had a question come to mind when I was watching the games. Is there a correlation between the amount of NFL players from a college team and conference success?

The answer was most likely, yes, but I wanted to see for myself.

First off, I looked at the total number of players in the NFL for each Big Ten team. To no surprise, Ohio State led the way with 40 players currently on an NFL roster.

There were a few surprises on this list, though.

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Rutgers was all the way up to No. 7 on the list with a total of 18 players in the NFL. This surprised me considering how mediocre-to-bad they have been over the last decade.

The other surprise I noticed was how low Michigan was on this list.

The Wolverines only have 17 players in the NFL and that ranks No. 8 in the Big Ten. They are right ahead of Illinois who has 15 players in the NFL.

Northwestern brings up the bottom of the Big Ten players in the NFL with a total of 6 players playing on Sunday’s.

So, now that I have the total number of players for each team in the NFL, I now need to figure out if this correlates to conference victories.

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To get a good read on whether the two have anything in common I had to take the past ten years as a sample size.

The past ten years pretty much covers all the players from the Big Ten in the NFL. That span of time seems about right.

The answer to my question if the number of NFL players correlates to the number of conference wins is, yes.

Ohio State led the way with 40 players currently in the NFL and they also lead the Big Ten in conference wins with 70 in the last 10 years.

It is also impressive that the only season the Buckeyes had under 7 wins the in the Big Ten was the year that Jim Tressel stepped down as head coach after the improper benefits scandal.

The top six teams with the most Big Ten players in the NFL are Ohio State, Penn State, Nebraska, Wisconsin, Michigan State, and Iowa in that order.

These six teams are also the top six teams in Big Ten wins over the last decade as well. That is why this question was so easy to answer.

The bottom of the Big Ten is Indiana with 17 conference wins and they were also second-to-last in the conference in NFL players as well.

Sadly, Illinois is second-to-last in Big Ten wins over the last ten years with 24, but they are No. 9 in the conference in NFL players with 15.

I can attribute a lot of their losing to having five different head coaches, regular and interim, in the last six seasons. That will cripple any program, but Illinois is finally moving in the right direction with Lovie Smith.

So, what was probably an obvious answer is now validated. The more talent you have playing in the NFL equals the more success you have had in the last decade.