No, this isn’t going to be a middle-school health class lecture.
Over the last decade, the SEC has, on average, had the best teams in the country. For a long time, even a strangle-hold on the national championship. In my ratings, the SEC has held the top place eight of the last ten seasons. Most years it isn’t very close.
That wasn’t always the case. Periodically, I take a look at where NFL players originate. When creating my data files for Front Office Football, I try and include the city where each player was born. If I can’t find that information, I use his high school. This should provide a reasonable origin point for NFL players.
The 2015 NFL draft included 256 players – 241 of them born in the United States. Here are the states they originated in:
Florida 36, Georgia 30, California 28, Texas 22, Alabama 13, Ohio 10, Pennsylvania 8, Maryland 7, North Carolina 7, Louisiana 6, Michigan 6, Mississippi 6, other states 62.
This isn’t close to a match of state population.
The average state produced 0.8 NFL draftees per million in population. Here are the states with the highest ratio:
Georgia 3.0, Alabama 2.7, Mississippi 2.0, Florida 1.8, Hawaii 1.4, Kansas 1.4, Louisiana 1.3, Maryland 1.2.
Some states we often associate with high school football – Ohio, Texas, California – only come out about average in ratio. It’s really the southeast that’s generating extraordinary numbers of players. And the SEC has seven of its 14 schools in that above list of eight states.
I threw together a very, very rough analysis of the power five conferences. I assigned a draftee to that conference based on the player’s origin. For states represented by two power conferences, I split the player based on the number of schools from each conference (for example, Texas players are .8 Big Twelve and .2 SEC).
Obviously, this is a crude measure. New Jersey players, for example, aren’t all going to consider the Big Ten first just because of Rutgers.
But this is what I came up with:
SEC 70, ACC 59, Big Ten 44, Pac Twelve 40, Big Twelve 24.
So, how did that crude estimate match where the 2015 NFL draft picks actually went to college?
Of the 256, 200 went to Power Five schools. This is how it broke down:
SEC 53, ACC 47, Pac Twelve 39, Big Ten 35, Big Twelve 26.
And, doing a proportional comparison, how did these conferences recruit based on my crude origin estimate?
Big Twelve +6, Pac Twelve +5, Big Ten -2, ACC -3, SEC -6.
So it’s a fairly reasonable estimate. The Big Twelve and the Pac Twelve have done a decent job going into the southeast and poaching a few extra players. But, by and large, the estimates are reasonable.
Given that well over half of the NFL talent pool comes from states solidly represented by SEC and ACC schools, the rest of the country has a lot to make up.
And, just for Big Ten grins, where did the five drafted New Jersey athletes go for college? One went to Rutgers, one to West Virginia, one to Virginia, one to Delaware and one to Monmouth (NJ). Maybe this will change given time.