Take one glance at the 2011 recruiting class of the NIU football team, and you’ll notice something different about it.

A mere four players in Dave Doeren’s first class at NIU are from Illinois. Past years have seen the vast majority of recruiting classes hailing from the Prairie State. Jerry Kill did a good job adding a few out-of-state recruits each year, but Illinois still ended up dominating all of his recruiting classes.

Much was made of Kill’s recruiting ties with the Kansas junior colleges, but the fact is that Kansas does not hold the kind of sway that Florida has. No one has ever heard of the devastating athletes from Kansas.

In the 2011 class, Arizona, Ohio, Indiana and Kansas are each represented with one future Huskie. A whopping six hail from Missouri, while five grew up in Florida. The class looks like one from a school serious about being a national contender.

Doeren stated numerous times that NIU is an easy sell to recruits, citing the Huskies’ recent appearance in the AP Top 25 and the team’s victory in the uDrove Humanitarian Bowl as reasons why NIU is known around the country by high school football players.

Doeren also mentioned that 15 players participating in the 2011 Super Bowl played their college football in the MAC. Most recruits talk about a desire to play in the NFL, and Doeren said that he felt good telling recruits that they had a chance to get to that level if they attend a MAC school.

The Huskies have a long way to go before even being mentioned in the same breath as Boise State and TCU, but the amount of players out of the football power states is hard to ignore. The Sunshine State is one of, if not the best place for football talent in the country, and NIU nabbed five players from there. For those slow football fans, that’s a good thing.

Doeren honed his recruiting skills at Montana and Kansas before coming on at Wisconsin. While coaching for the Badgers, Doeren was in charge of all recruiting in Florida. Without much time from his mid-December hiring to Wednesday, Doeren relied heavily on his recruiting ties in the biggest retirement community in the country.

It’s impossible to tell what kind of success the Florida recruits will have, but pedigree means everything. Getting players that come from an atmosphere that is as competitive as Florida is creates a winning atmosphere.

“We looked for players on winning teams,” Doeren said. “We wanted guys that knew how to win.”

Doeren was speaking to the entire class when he made that statement, but when detailing the Florida recruits, Doeren almost always mentioned a winning high school program that follows the recruit to NIU. With a few more classes like this, these Florida recruits will have a winning program following them into the NFL.