College Football Recruiting: Where do 5-star recruits call home?

Five-star college football recruits don’t grow on trees, but they do tend to originate from similar geographic areas, predominantly in the south.

Technically a 5-star recruit could be born anywhere from Massachusettes to Montana and a prospect’s home state has no connection to their athletic ability.  In reality, however, 5-star recruits don’t come from either Massachusettes or Montana and their home state’s relationship with the sport of football is directly connected to the likelihood of whether or not they’re able to earn that perfect 5-star grade.

We’ve compiled a list of all the 5-star recruits over the past five years and noticed a number of trends about size, positions, and home state.  That said, to keep things simple we’ll just focus on the home state today.

Now, let’s take a look at the chart below.

Perhaps its no surprise to see the usual suspects with the highest number of 5-stars, but how loyal are these prospects to their home and are their state university football programs able to convince them to stay home?

One state that does a phenomenal job at retaining their homegrown talent as well as poaching on others is the Buckeye State.  Even though they only have four 5-Star recruits in the past five years they were able to convince three of them to commit to Ohio State and rake in big-time recruits from football hubs like Florida.

Ohio only had one more recruit on the chart than New Jersey, but the Garden State’s flagship university, Rutgers clearly isn’t on the same level as OSU when it comes to football.  While the Buckeyes held on to three of the four home state prospects, Rutgers let all three of New Jersey’s 5-star recruits go to Michigan, Penn State and Alabama, respectively.

But let’s give New Jersey a break, after all as we already know they aren’t the only one getting beat by the Buckeyes on the recruiting trail.  As I was just saying, they’ve done some impressive work in the Sunshine State. In fact, they even managed to get commitments from more 5-star recruits in the last five years than the Miami Hurricanes and Florida State combined.

The Buckeyes have been able to get five commits while the Florida powerhouses have only been able to get a pair each in the same amount of time.

The Ohio State University has long been a college football juggernaut, but one might assume that in the absence of Urban Meyer it’s going to be difficult to keep up with the pace set by their two previous coaches.  On the contrary, so far so good and it looks like Ohio State hasn’t even missed a beat.

Case in point, the first major recruiting headlines of the post-Meyer era was about how they lost 4-star quarterback Tate Martell to the transfer portal, but somehow OSU had already secured a replacement with an even higher profile transfer – Justin Fields.  As luck would have it for the Buckeyes, Fields is a 5-star quarterback from Georgia who decided he’d rather play in Columbus than suit up for his home state Bulldogs.

Ohio State serves as a powerful reminder to never underestimate the power of recruiting because at the end of the day staying home and growing from your roots isn’t as appealing to some 5-star recruits as cutting ties and flying wherever their heart desires.