MINNEAPOLIS — Ever wonder how Minnesota stacks up against its peers in deer hunting?

Among the 11 states now represented in the Big Ten Conference, Gopher Nation stands out as a blueblood in the categories of opportunity and participation.

Minnesota boasts 8.2 million acres of public hunting land and has fielded an average of 476,000 deer hunters per season over the past 10 years. Those numbers are fundamental to the state's rich tradition of whitetail hunting. But when it comes to targeting monster bucks, tallying total deer harvest and measuring hunter success rates, the bragging rights belong elsewhere. Least flattering for Minnesota is its last-place finish in the category of total deer harvest per 100 hunters.

In the Star Tribune's first Big Ten Deer Hunting Power Rankings, Minnesota and Iowa share fifth place. Michigan is No. 1. Wisconsin and Ohio are tied for second, and Pennsylvania is fourth. Predictably, New Jersey ranks last, but even in the home of the Rutgers Scarlet Knights, buck fever is for real. To tie Minnesota, Iowa helped itself with a second-place finish in hunter success.

Based largely on the 2024 Deer Report by the National Deer Association (NDA), we scoped out six different metrics associated with deer hunting in the Big Ten. Here's what we found:

1. Michigan

— Strike up the band for first place in public land

In states like Iowa and Texas, deer hunting depends mightily on access to private land. States like Michigan and Minnesota were rewarded in our rankings for providing license buyers ample opportunity to hunt on public land. About 20% of the Wolverine State is open to hunt, the largest share in our review of each state's total land acres. (Minnesota ranked second, with 16.1% of its land mass open for hunting.) The public land data, as tabulated by Backcountry Chronicles, omits surface waters.

In Michigan, a state with 36.2 million total acres of land, 7.3 million acres are public. Michigan's bountiful harvest of 339,189 whitetails in 2022 was third most in the Big Ten, just a sliver behind Wisconsin and a fair distance behind No. 1 Pennsylvania. Then again, exactly half of all Michigan deer hunters shot at least one deer — by far the highest percentage in our rankings. To gauge the popularity of deer hunting in each state, we used license data and census data to determine the number of deer hunters per 1,000 residents old enough to hunt. Michigan was third best with a ratio of 60 hunters per 1,000 residents aged 10 and older.

2. Wisconsin and Ohio (tie)

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