The 16 states (and one federal territory that should be a state) with every type of star rating in the 2020 class: Arizona, California, D.C., Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, and Washington. The last time each state had a player of each star rating State Through the college freshman class of 2019, here’s how long it had been since every state in the union had a recruit of every star rating: Some states have never even had a two-star, meaning recruiting services have basically decided to skip evaluating players there. This is the 2017 Five-Star Desert, which looks pretty similar to a lot of previous years:ĩ. Those spots where it looks like there aren't any star recruits? There aren't. This is every first-rounder from 2008 through 2017: Morgan MoriartyĨ. How about where first-round NFL draft picks come from? Here, we see the Northeast emerging a little more. Georgia also outstrips the non-Texas, Florida, and Cali schools here.ħ. There are just a lot of players there, in general. The Texan, Floridian and Californian share of the country’s total recruits isn’t all that different than their share of blue-chip players. The home-state distribution of every single listed recruit in the country, from 2008 through 2013: Football Study Hall (DC), MD, TN, SC, NC /N6wNkEQT57- NCAA Research April 18, 2017Ħ.
States w/ highest % of HS football players recruited by a DI school:Ĥ-8. Wanna go by high school players who go Division I, rather than total population? Understandable. If you considered all of D.C.’s recruits to be part of Maryland or Virginia - which is wrong, but makes sense if you’re trying to figure out which colleges have the easiest recruiting footprints - you’d see a new leader on this list: Georgia, where the Bulldogs have a massive advantage.ĥ. Blue-chips are an annual average from 2015-19, based on the 247Sports Composite.Ī caveat: the District of Columbia is just a city, and if Los Angeles got to be its own “state,” it’d win the blue-chips-per-capita contest in a landslide. Want to look at that per capita? Here’s how each state does scaled to its overall population, using its number of four- and five-stars per class and Census estimates:īlue-chip football recruits per capita, 2015-19 Location Again, just about any five-year period will tell the same story:īlue-chip football recruits by state, 2015-19 StateĤ. Check the breakdown of state shares of blue-chip recruits, and notice how little the picture changes annually.
That’s reflected in the full data as well.ģ. You’ll notice that more top players appear to come from three or four states – Florida, Texas and California, along with Georgia – than anywhere else. Another way to think about it: a map of the 330-ish highest-ranked recruits in the ratings era. Here's a heat map of every top-15 national recruit’s hometown, from 2000 to 2021, using consensus rankings from the 247Sports Composite. Focusing in on just the stars produces a similar map. Whenever you’re reading this, the outlook’s similar for that season.Ģ. In 2016, Jake Sharpless of Rukkus (it seems that site is no more) published this heat map that demonstrated the geographic origins of every player in the country:Ī consistent theme with data and maps in this post is that geographic trends don’t change a ton year to year. At various points over the years, we’ve put together data to give you a better picture of the geographical trends that have shaped the player pool, and other outlets have done so as well. Large swaths of the country produce very few FBS players, while some hotspots produce tons of them. College football players come from all over, but not every region is equal in how many players it produces.