Recruiting and geography

https://blog.modeanalytics.com/where-football-players-call-home/

To help explore these questions, the interactive map below shows where all of today’s 25,000 Division-I college football players call home, according to ESPN. The map shows how players' hometowns differ by conference, team, and position.
Click on the map to see the interactive visualization

The map reveals a few interesting things:

1. Conferences tend to focus heavily on recruiting locally. Only the area around Los Angeles is well-represented in nearly every conference.
2. The largest number of players come from LA, New York, South Florida, and Houston. Relative to the number of college-aged males in the region, however, the south produces the most players.
3. South Florida produces a lot of football players—except kickers and punters.

While conferences tend to be local, it’s possible that some teams within conferences have better reach than others. To approximate how well programs recruit beyond their home state, I calculated a rough measure of geographic diversity, based on how many states are represented on each team and how many players come from each state. For example, a team with 50 players from one state would have the lowest diversity score, while a state with one player from each of the 50 states would have the highest. The most and least diverse programs, as well as a few notable teams, are show below.

Auburn and Alabama are somewhat more diverse than average, suggesting they are able to recruit broadly. However, there’s no clear trend among the best teams. The least diverse football programs are typically small regional teams, while—perhaps surprisingly—the most diverse teams are not national powers but schools that likely to attract players for reasons beyond the football field. Notably, Texas—traditionally a top-tier team and a large national program—rarely recruits outside of Texas.


http://www.sbnation.com/college-football-recruiting/2016/6/28/12040586/rankings-state-stars-florida-texas-california


All the data here come from the 247Sports Composite, which aggregates ratings agencies' evaluations of players. Our state-by-state blue-chip counts don't align perfectly with the website's national count of them, but their resulting figures are within decimal points of equal for each year. (I counted manually and the website is always updating.)
Here's how many blue-chip players have come from every state in the last five years, with each state's national percentage of elite talent attached:

State	'17	'16	'15	'14	'13	Total	Percentage of total
Florida	45	47	50	42	46	230	14.0%
Texas	43	52	47	37	46	225	13.7%
California	36	45	44	34	41	200	12.2%
Georgia	33	26	34	23	25	141	8.6%
Ohio	15	12	17	15	19	78	4.8%
Louisiana	12	21	13	16	12	74	4.5%
Alabama	14	8	12	11	13	58	3.5%
Virginia	14	6	13	10	13	56	3.4%
North Carolina	7	15	9	13	7	51	3.1%
Tennessee	9	8	11	7	9	44	2.7%
Pennsylvania	8	9	9	7	10	43	2.6%
New Jersey	4	8	7	10	11	40	2.4%
Illinois	5	6	5	12	9	37	2.3%
Mississippi	5	11	7	8	5	36	2.2%
Michigan	10	9	4	4	8	35	2.1%
Maryland	8	11	6	4	6	35	2.1%
South Carolina	4	5	5	9	5	28	1.7%
Arizona	6	5	2	7	6	26	1.6%
Indiana	3	4	3	6	7	23	1.4%
Oklahoma	4	1	5	7	2	19	1.2%
Washington	4	3	6	2	2	17	1.0%
Arkansas	2	3	5	2	3	15	0.9%
Utah	4	2	3	3	1	13	0.8%
D.C.	1	4	3	2	3	13	0.8%
Nevada	5	0	3	4	0	12	0.7%
Missouri	3	1	3	3	2	12	0.7%
Oregon	2	2	1	2	3	10	0.6%
Colorado	2	1	3	3	1	10	0.6%
Hawaii	2	2	4	0	2	10	0.6%
Kentucky	1	3	2	2	1	9	0.5%
New York	1	0	1	3	1	6	0.4%
Minnesota	0	1	1	3	1	6	0.4%
Kansas	0	3	0	3	0	6	0.4%
Iowa	0	2	0	2	1	5	0.3%
Wisconsin	0	2	0	2	1	5	0.3%
Connecticut	2	0	2	0	0	4	0.2%
Delaware	1	0	0	1	0	2	0.1%
New Mexico	1	0	1	0	0	2	0.1%
Massachusetts	0	0	0	0	2	2	0.1%
Nebraska	0	0	0	0	2	2	0.1%
Idaho	0	0	1	0	0	1	0.1%
South Dakota	0	1	0	0	0	1	0.1%
Alaska	0	0	0	0	0	0	0.0%
Maine	0	0	0	0	0	0	0.0%
Montana	0	0	0	0	0	0	0.0%
New Hampshire	0	0	0	0	0	0	0.0%
North Dakota	0	0	0	0	0	0	0.0%
Rhode Island	0	0	0	0	0	0	0.0%
Vermont	0	0	0	0	0	0	0.0%
West Virginia	0	0	0	0	0	0	0.0%
Wyoming	0	0	0	0	0	0	0.0%
National	316	339	342	319	326	1642	100.0%

The top five states have more than half the country's blue-chip players for the last five years, at 53.3 percent of the total.

Florida, Texas and California really do have so, so many more elite recruits than anybody else. Between the three, they've got about 40 percent of them. The top nine states have two-thirds of the national total.
Georgia has pretty well entrenched itself as the fourth-best recruiting state, with some combination of Ohio and Louisiana at Nos. 5 and 6. Then there's a mass of states that produces between 2 and 5 percent of the country's top recruits every year, and then a bunch more that almost (or literally) never produce elite players. Nine states haven't had any blue-chip players in the last five years. Some states have never, ever had them.

It makes a difference. Check out maps No. 6 through 9 here, which point out a few things: Champions come from areas with lots of good players, the best players are hugely clumped together in the big three states and the SEC and Pac-12 are operating at enormous geographic advantages.

This picture never really changes, either.

I went into this research expecting to find that some states have particular years where they would erupt and produce far more blue-chip prospects than normal. Not really!
States' shares of the national blue-chip ranks stay almost the exact same every year, with very few exceptions.

State	'17	'16	'15	'14	'13
Florida	14.2%	13.9%	14.6%	13.2%	14.1%
Texas	13.6%	15.3%	13.7%	11.6%	14.1%
California	11.4%	13.3%	12.9%	10.7%	12.6%
Georgia	10.4%	7.7%	9.9%	7.2%	7.7%
Ohio	4.7%	3.5%	5.0%	4.7%	5.8%
Alabama	4.4%	2.4%	3.5%	3.4%	4.0%
Virginia	4.4%	1.8%	3.8%	3.1%	4.0%
Louisiana	3.8%	6.2%	3.8%	5.0%	3.7%
Michigan	3.2%	2.7%	1.2%	1.3%	2.5%
Tennessee	2.8%	2.4%	3.2%	2.2%	2.8%
Pennsylvania	2.5%	2.7%	2.6%	2.2%	3.1%
Maryland	2.5%	3.2%	1.8%	1.3%	1.8%
North Carolina	2.2%	4.4%	2.6%	4.1%	2.1%
Arizona	1.9%	1.5%	0.6%	2.2%	1.8%
Nevada	1.6%	0.0%	0.9%	1.3%	0.0%
Mississippi	1.6%	3.2%	2.0%	2.5%	1.5%
Illinois	1.6%	1.8%	1.5%	3.8%	2.8%
Utah	1.3%	0.6%	0.9%	0.9%	0.3%
New Jersey	1.3%	2.4%	2.0%	3.1%	3.4%
Washington	1.3%	0.9%	1.8%	0.6%	0.6%
South Carolina	1.3%	1.5%	1.5%	2.8%	1.5%
Oklahoma	1.3%	0.3%	1.5%	2.2%	0.6%
Missouri	0.9%	0.3%	0.9%	0.9%	0.6%
Indiana	0.9%	1.2%	0.9%	1.9%	2.1%
Oregon	0.6%	0.6%	0.3%	0.6%	0.9%
Connecticut	0.6%	0.0%	0.6%	0.0%	0.0%
Colorado	0.6%	0.3%	0.9%	0.9%	0.3%
Arkansas	0.6%	0.9%	1.5%	0.6%	0.9%
Hawaii	0.6%	0.6%	1.2%	0.0%	0.6%
Delaware	0.3%	0.0%	0.0%	0.3%	0.0%
New Mexico	0.3%	0.0%	0.3%	0.0%	0.0%
D.C.	0.3%	1.2%	0.9%	0.6%	0.9%
Kentucky	0.3%	0.9%	0.6%	0.6%	0.3%
New York	0.3%	0.0%	0.3%	0.9%	0.3%
Alaska	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%
Maine	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%
Montana	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%
New Hampshire	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%
North Dakota	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%
Rhode Island	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%
Vermont	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%
West Virginia	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%
Wyoming	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%
Idaho	0.0%	0.0%	0.3%	0.0%	0.0%
South Dakota	0.0%	0.3%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%
Iowa	0.0%	0.6%	0.0%	0.6%	0.3%
Wisconsin	0.0%	0.6%	0.0%	0.6%	0.3%
Massachusetts	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.6%
Minnesota	0.0%	0.3%	0.3%	0.9%	0.3%
Nebraska	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.6%
Kansas	0.0%	0.9%	0.0%	0.9%	0.0%

The state with the biggest jump in blue-chippers this year is Michigan, whose 10 four- and five-star kids mark, in total, a 2.3 percent increase over its average from the last four classes. That's the maximum.
The players change every year, but recruiting, on the whole, barely changes at all. If your state has a lot of elite players, it'll keep doing that. And if it doesn't, it'll keep doing that, too.

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