Where do Power 4 players come from?
Mostly Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth, Los Angeles, the DMV, Houston, and Miami
This is just a quick post I’m using as a means of showing off that I now have the ability to identify the county a given Power 4 player is from, and thus can categorize players into the various census-defined metropolitan areas. Longtime readers of my work will now that I previously considered Miami, Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, and Los Angeles the premier locales for attracting FBS talent. On an updated and more refined look, we can comfortably expand this to include the DMV region.
This is not all Power 4 players, and technically I do not have any guarantee that all of the “scholarship players” are actually on scholarship. But I feel safe in my assumption that all players who received a 3+ star rating coming out of high school/JUCO or in the transfer portal are on scholarship. And it is possible that some of the players from a “rural” region are actually from smaller metros which I did not bother to categorize (i.e. Macon). But those are small details which I will not sweat at this juncture.
This is an extremely rich data source and will allow us in the future to ask and answer many interesting questions. But we’ll leave that for a future date, for now I’ll just leave you all with some quick observations.
Atlanta, the DFW, Los Angeles, the DMV, Houston, and Miami clearly produce far and away the most P4-caliber talent of any American metro regions. It’s not even particularly close. However, I do find it a bit curious that the two metros which produce far and away the most talent (Atlanta and DFW) just so happen to contain the two largest airport hubs in the US. I’m very curious about how players from these areas which go out of state fare relative to their in-state/close to in-state counterparts.
Chicago, New York, and rural Georgia form a clear second tier. This makes sense to me. The core Big Ten teams can easily pull from Chicago for recruits to fill out their rosters, as can the eastern seaboard teams (Boston College, Rutgers, Penn State, Pittsburgh, Maryland, etc) do so for New York. Note that Greater New York here does include northern NJ which is known to produce significant amounts of talent. I can envision rural Georgia - which in this case means outside of the Atlanta and Savannah metros - fulfilling a similar role for SEC schools. I would be interested in comparing the talent level of recruits from these three areas, since in common understanding of the college football landscape might suggest that rural GA puts out more talented players then NYC/Chicago even if the volume is fairly comparable. I want to test this!
After the top 9 the curve really starts to smooth out and any sort of precise tiers would be equivalent to drawing lines in the sand. Once we get past that point we also run into cases where the recruits coming out of a given metro really only attend a handful of schools. As an example, of the 104 current scholarship P4 players from the Orlando metro, 28 of them (26.9%!) play for either UCF or Florida. For the most egregious example, 36 of the 80 scholarship P4 players from the Salt Lake City metro (45%!) play for BYU. At this juncture it is not obvious to me whether these schools should be applauded for putting up a fence around their backyards, or if it is evidence the bottom of their rosters could improve by spreading out wider. I don’t know, but I really want to look into it!
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