Elite States of Recruiting: Running Backs

What schools are getting the best skill players? The top offensive linemen? The highest-rated defensive linemen? Which conferences are pulling in the most elite talent at a given position? And, in an attempt to answer the water-cooler debate once and for all,  states produce the most elite-level recruits for a given position?

The running back position in football has been the most common element since football's 19th-century beginnings (it wouldn't be until 1906 after numerous deaths - and a presidential intervention - to institute the forward pass). The constant has been running with the ball.

This is the second installment of examining elite recruits (see the 1st article on QBs here). We'll be looking at the top ESPN recruits from 2006 through 2011. Note that ESPN did not use the star designations until the 2010 recruiting cycle. Therefore, I've limited the sample to recruits who graded at 80 or better for this study (this left out a few 4* 79 players; but not all 79 grade players were 4-star recruits).

Below you'll find a table of all ESPN 80+ running back recruits from the 2006 through 2011 recruiting cycles. The table is sortable by clicking on the header.

Of the 120 total 80+ running backs, 42 (35%) went to an SEC school. That is astounding. The ACC comes in a distant 2nd, getting 20 - good for ~17%. The SEC took more top running backs during this period than the 2nd (ACC) and 3rd (Big-12) place teams combined.

This sentence here is reserved for general mocking of the Big lEast.

That's right - FSU will open the 2011 season against a ULM team with the same number of elite ESPN backs.

Per Capita

In 2009, 24.3% of the US population of 308 million was under the age of 18, or about 75 million kids (quickfacts.census.gov). The numbers and percentages, obviously, vary by state. Florida, for example, had 21.9% of its roughly 18.8 million person population under the age of 18, or about 4.1 million kids.

Let's start with a simple assumption that any state can produce an elite recruit equally. Said another way, how might a state's population determine the likelihood of producing said recruit? This is the per capita argument: Total state numbers (here, elite RB recruits) are primarily determined by that state's population. Let's test this hypothesis.

The table below is a list of States along with their respective youth population (under 18; in units of 1,000). The next column "As % of" is the percentage of all US youth in that state by US total number (approximately 74.4 million ; taken from government 2005 estimates). After that is the total number of elite RB recruits from that state from 2006 to 2011. "As % of" is a column to show each state's percentage of total elite RB recruits nationally. Finally, the "Odds Ratio" column is the fun part: We divide a state's percent of elite RB recruits by its percentage of total under-18 US population. A number here greater than 1.0 means that that state is producing more elite QB recruits than what the per capita line-of-thinking says we should be seeing; lower than 1.0 means you're not producing your fair share.

There are some striking results from the above (sortable) table. First, we see that Florida is #1 in terms of total production of elite running backs. That is remarkable in of itself. We know that Florida's population is smaller than that of Texas' and California's, so that is striking. Compare the odds ratios for those 3, and you see that Florida produces 1.8 (3.95/2.19) times the amount of elite RBs than what we'd expect from Texas and 6.7 (3.95/0.59) times that of California's expected number. That is remarkable, especially given the Texan cultural commitment to football.

#1 for all states though in odds ratio (again, which takes into account the relative size of the under 18 population of one's state) is Louisiana. Louisiana has a relatively small under-18 population, yet an astounding number of elite RB recruits.

Conversation Starter: Which state per capita rate of elite RB production surprises you the most over this 5-year period?