9 maps and charts that explain where college football players come from

College football players come from all over, but not every region is equal in how many players it produces. Large swaths of the country produce very few FBS players, while some hotspots produce tons of them. 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. Here’s a digest.

1. 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:

A consistent theme with data and maps in this post is that geographic trends don’t change a ton year to year. Whenever you’re reading this, the outlook’s similar for that season.

2. Focusing in on just the stars produces a similar map. Here's a heat map of every top-15 national recruit’s hometown, from 2000 to 2021, using consensus rankings from the 247Sports Composite. Another way to think about it: a map of the 330-ish highest-ranked recruits in the ratings era.

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. That’s reflected in the full data as well.

3. Check the breakdown of state shares of blue-chip recruits, and notice how little the picture changes annually. Again, just about any five-year period will tell the same story:

4. 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:

A 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. 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.

5. Wanna go by high school players who go Division I, rather than total population? Understandable. The NCAA figured that out in 2017:

6. The home-state distribution of every single listed recruit in the country, from 2008 through 2013:

Football Study Hall

The Texan, Floridian and Californian share of the country’s total recruits isn’t all that different than their share of blue-chip players. There are just a lot of players there, in general. Georgia also outstrips the non-Texas, Florida, and Cali schools here.

7. How about where first-round NFL draft picks come from? Here, we see the Northeast emerging a little more. This is every first-rounder from 2008 through 2017:

Morgan Moriarty

8. Those spots where it looks like there aren't any star recruits? There aren't. This is the 2017 Five-Star Desert, which looks pretty similar to a lot of previous years:

9. It’s not just a lack of five-stars. Some states have never even had a two-star, meaning recruiting services have basically decided to skip evaluating players there. 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:

Oh, and there are also a bunch of no-star punters and kickers from Australia.

College football players come from lots of places, but a few states create lots more of them than the rest. There’s a trickle-down effect, whether it’s from population moves, evaluators’ bias, or superior player development, that leads to tons more blue-chip recruits also coming from those states. Mathematically, it makes sense.

It changes how the sport works. The greatest competitive advantages a college football program can have are money and easy access to good recruits. And how much access a team has depends, in large part, on its zip code.