Video: Which states are producing the most college football talent?Steve Montoya and Chris Brown break down the numbers produced by Lateral Sports.By looking at the location of college football programs you can make some assumptions about which regions of the country are recruited by the most college coaching staffs.
For a more accurate outlook, we've gone a step further than just guessing based on location. We have tracked every high school athlete that has gone on to play in college at a Division I, Division II, Division III or NAIA program over the past five years. Doing so allows us to pinpoint every college program with a recruiting footprint in your state.
There are patterns in the ways college coaches recruit each year and all sorts of factors such as budget constraints and personal relationships play into that. Having the right expectations about which programs will be spending time in your region can help you and your athletes better plan for the college search process.
The state that more colleges recruit than any other is Florida – 592 of the 756 college football programs have a player from the Sunshine State. Another way to say that is 78 percent of college football teams have at least one Floridian.
The situation is different in every state, however, and this means that the way an athlete handles the recruiting process in Oregon should be different than the way they go about it in Florida or Illinois. The top five states where the most colleges have pulled players from over the last five years are:
Florida – 592 programs (78 percent)
California – 535 programs (71)
Texas – 444 programs (59)
Georgia – 423 programs (56)
Illinois – 361 programs (44)
Percentages indicate number of college football programs with player from that state.
Despite having similar populations, twice as many college programs recruit Maryland as Minnesota. If you're in Minnesota, you won't be able to magically change a college's recruiting budget or recruiting travel schedule this fall, but knowing the reality of how college football programs have recruited the country over the past five years allows you and your athletes to make a better plan: if you aren't proactive or you just wait for college staffs to come to you, then you're cutting yourself off from 80 percent of the opportunities that are out there.
Only in Florida, California, Georgia and Texas do over 50 percent of college coaching staffs have a presence.
What does this mean?
If you see that you are in one of the less-recruited areas, you now know that being proactive should be expected in making connections with college coaching staffs. It isn't necessarily that a program thinks your players aren't good enough, rather, it's likely they have other constraints keeping them from making a visit to a new region. And If you're in one of the areas with heavy recruiting activity, we will be providing more information in every newsletter to help your athletes research all of their options this fall, and to show you more about every team with the strongest pipelines in your city.
MaxPreps is teaming up with Lateral Sports to share college recruiting-related insights, facts and research that has never been available before. Lateral Sports tracks data for NCAA and NAIA student-athletes with the goal of helping recruits make informed decisions. The Student-Athlete Guide for 2016-17 will be released Oct. 1.
