Football Signing Day – State Talent

Football Recruiting General NCS Football73

It is signing day! So, why not run an in-depth piece on talent and recruiting (as a follow-up to this entry with some great links in it)

Whether it was reality or mis-perception, Chuck Amato had a reputation for preferring high school players from talent-rich states like Florida over those from North Carolina high schools. Ironically, the recruiting class that Amato was creating this season was almost exclusively NC-based. (If you are genuinely interested in more on this topic, this entry is a must read.) As Tom O’Brien heads into his (quasi) first recruiting class, then we thought it would be a good time to touch on the topic of talent again.

WRAL’s David Glenn recently blogged an interesting entry discussing the talent in the state of North Carolina High Schools that can be read by clicking here. The premise is summarized as:

Former East Carolina head coach Steve Logan, now the offensive coordinator at Boston College, recently said on his radio show (620 The Bull in Durham) that he would recommend Davis or O’Brien using all 25 scholarships in a given year on in-state prospects. Logan offered only anecdotal evidence to support the wisdom of such a decision, and that seems to be the case with everyone in the “North Carolina Talent Is Wonderful” camp. It’s easy to throw compliments, on a case-by-case basis, in every direction. It’s a lot more difficult to find hard evidence to support the broader claim.

Glenn goes on to reference some previous research that was done by the ACC Area Sports Journal regarding recruiting in the state.

Research by the ACC Sports Journal and ACCSports.com repeatedly has shown that North Carolina has the worst “football demographics” of any state in the ACC region. The state’s average of about 60 Division I-A signees per year isn’t bad — that ranks among the top dozen in the nation — but the presence of five I-A programs in the state, along with numerous others within a reasonable driving distance, offers a significant complication. Georgia, in contrast, has two I-A teams and produces about 150 I-A signees per year. As Amato said, to the chagrin of many locals, there’s no denying that the simple math — I-A signees/I-A teams — isn’t pretty in North Carolina.

^This information is pretty captivating. We actually highlighted it and discussed it in this key entry back when the original entry was posted.

Here’s the breakdown of how many Division I-A signees the traditional ACC states produce on an annual basis, relative to the number of I-A programs in the state:

Georgia 75 (150 signees, two teams) prospects per school,

Florida 50 (350/7),
Virginia 25 (50/2),
Maryland 20 (40/2),
South Carolina 20 (40/2),
North Carolina 12 (60/5).

Here’s the breakdown when you limit the same numbers to only BCS-conference teams:
Florida 87 (350/4) per school,
Georgia 75 (150/2),
Maryland 40 (40/1),

Virginia 25 (50/2),

South Carolina 20 (40/2),
North Carolina 15 (60/4).

I don’t think that the issue is that there is not enough talent in North Carolina to succeed. The problem is that there are too many teams splitting the talent for our schools to succeed.

Of course those schools that ARE local need to do a better job of keeping talent in the state when we have the opportunity. Dave Glenn proves my point in this fantastic exercise of creating a hypothetical “All North Carolina” team

What if there was only one Division I-A football team in North Carolina, instead of five? What if its coaches were smart enough to identify, without exception, the best high school prospects in the state every single year? What if the team then was able to sign every one of those top targets, rather than losing many of them to out-of-state programs? What would that hypothetical All-North Carolina team look like, based on what actual North Carolina products did at schools throughout Division I-A football during the 2006 season?

The good news is, there definitely would be enough proven players to field a team. The bad news is, out of the 300-plus North Carolina high school football players who signed with Division I-A teams over the past five years, only eight (see below) earned first- or second-team all-conference honors this fall.

As Trout pointed out in a comments section of a previous entry – the number of D1 signees is correlated to the population of that state:

Florida: 17.7 million, 350 signees
Georgia: 9.1 million, 150 signees
North Carolina: 8.6 million, 60 signees
Virginia: 7.6 million, 50 signees
Maryland: 5.6 million, 40 signees
South Carolina: 4.3 million, 40 signees

Again – the issue isn’t the gross amount of talent in the state of North Carolina. The issue is the disproportionately large number of local programs that the local talent must support. Add to this mix the fact that UNC-Charlotte is now considering the addition of a Division One football program and you wonder if local schools will soon be starting two-hundred point linemen. (The UNC Board of Governors would do well to squash this ‘dream’ right now!)

GeorgiaSportsBlog produced a similar, and even more detailed look at football talent by state One of their data points was number of NFL players produced by states.

1. California – 199
2. Florida – 179
3. Texas – 176
4. Georgia – 90
5. Ohio – 78
6. Louisiana – 76
7. Pennsylvania – 58
8. Michigan – 50
9. Virginia – 49
10. South Carolina – 48

When you look at the location of all of this talent…is it any wonder that the SEC is expected to produce SIX TOP TEN classes today?

Percent of NFL players by conference in ’05

SEC states — 31.66%
ACC states — 26.95%
Big East states – 24.35%
Big 10 states — 20.46%
Big 12 states — 17.04%
Pac 10 states — 16.33%

Note: Please don’t use this entry to dive too deep into individual names that NC State is recruiting this year. We will have an entry for everyone to go “On the Record” with their thoughts, etc.

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73 Responses to Football Signing Day – State Talent

  1. Woof Wolf 02/07/2007 at 1:26 PM #

    Carolina not only got Little, they just got Marvin Austin the DT out of DC. He is rated 3rd best player in the country by Scout.

  2. branjawn 02/07/2007 at 1:28 PM #

    nevermind. John Hannah – TE from Louisburg JC , former Rivals100 player

  3. choppack1 02/07/2007 at 1:35 PM #

    I think that NC has some good prospects, however, in half of the state, the kids are just as close to Clemson, USC and UT as they are to the Triangle.

    Of course, it looks like one school has made some headway in that arena.

  4. C Dog 02/07/2007 at 1:40 PM #

    I don’t know how reputable Superprep’s rankings of North Carolina talent is, but the Holes got 3 of the top 4 players on that list: Little, Powell and Jones. Maybe they will follow tradition and get kicked off the team.

  5. lsutton5144 02/07/2007 at 1:56 PM #

    Word is that Euwell was being hounded by Ken Browning from UNC. When he wouldn’t give TOB a firm verbal during the home visit, they cut him loose. I also see that there may be an issue with grades and not yet being qualified. IMHO, we made the right choice.

  6. stateguy08 02/07/2007 at 2:06 PM #

    stars mean nothing in my opinion, Jay Davis was a 4 star, who turned out to be horrible, then on the other end you have manny lawson who went from being a 1 start to a first round pick in the draft. sure, on the board carolina might be beating us, but we wont know until the season

  7. RickJ 02/07/2007 at 2:20 PM #

    Regarding our class, I think the JC punter (Ruiz) and the JC DE/DT (Holmes) may have the biggest impact on next year’s team.

  8. RedTerror29 02/07/2007 at 2:23 PM #

    Ratings are very unreliable at the individual level, but in the aggregate they give a good estimate of the inflow of talent for a program.

    SFN: We are bolding this statement because it needs to be emphasized.

  9. noah 02/07/2007 at 2:53 PM #

    Anyone who thinks recruiting ratings don’t matter should explain to me why Ohio State, Florida, USC, and Texas always seem to have top-five recruiting classes.

    Here’s Tom Lemming’s top 100 list for individual players from 2001.
    http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/football/college/recruiting/august/100/

    Quite a few familiar names. Compare that list to the NFL drafts from 2004-6 and you’ll see a lot of those names twice.

  10. class of 74 02/07/2007 at 2:58 PM #

    I’d rather have a 5 star coaching staff than a group of 5 star recruits with a one star coaching staff. We’ve gotten the coach, now let’s wait to see how he and his staff do. History says we will be just fine.

  11. BoKnowsNCS71 02/07/2007 at 3:13 PM #

    http://www.signonsandiego.com/sports/college_football/20070205-9999-lz1s5chips.html

    Interesting article Noah.

    “Just ask fans of Miami, Alabama, North Carolina and North Carolina State.

    Their coaches were fired after this past season for failing to live up to the hype of all the high school talent they had recruited over the previous five Februarys. Those four teams and eight others amassed a cumulative top 25 recruiting ranking for the previous five years, according to Rivals.com and Scout.com – only to finish unranked with all that talent last season. Five of those 12 unranked teams had losing records.”

  12. class of 74 02/07/2007 at 3:19 PM #

    Noah:
    Pose that same question to Bobby Bowden and Jim Grobe in our conference for last year. Recruits alone don’t make the program if they did Texas would have 25 national championships by now and darn near that many additional top five finishes.

    Bottomline, you better have the right coach at a school with football tradition if you want to compete for championships. The recruits will follow. Congrats to Grobe for doing it without the tradition or the recruits.

  13. stateguy08 02/07/2007 at 3:41 PM #

    Yeah thats nice noah, but you missed the point

    just because you have a bunch of low recruits doesn’t mean theyre not going to be good, and just because you have a load of 4 and 5 star rated players doesnt mean theyre all going to be good, there will be duds.

    I agree with noah, can’t wait to see what this season will bring, and what happens w/ recruiting the next few years.

  14. noah 02/07/2007 at 3:42 PM #

    I tell ya what…I’ll take 15 players a year and I’ll choose them from the Tom Lemming top 100 list. Hell, I’ll restrict myself to the top 50. I’ll fill out the rest of my roster with walk-ons.

    You can take 25 a year and you can have the rest of the country.

    I’ll always have a substantially better team.

    If recruiting rankings didn’t matter, people wouldn’t pay to produce them, people wouldn’t pay for access to them and ESPN U and Fox Sports Net wouldn’t spend time covering national signing day.

    You can tell yourself whatever you want, it’s fine by me. You can cite individual examples all day long too. But you are never going to convince me that rankings don’t matter.

  15. stateguy08 02/07/2007 at 3:50 PM #

    I’d like to add that since winning the gator bowl, we had 2 great recruiting classes the next 2 years, and had a car care bowl win over SF and a 3-9 season to show for it

  16. BoKnowsNCS71 02/07/2007 at 3:52 PM #

    Noah, would it make a difference if your coaching staff was Jim Bunting and Noel Mazzone while the rest of us got Urban Meyer and Steve Spurrier to head our staff?

  17. choppack1 02/07/2007 at 3:53 PM #

    Recruiting definitely does matter for the elite schools. What I would like to see though is how it impacts the top 15 to top 40.

    There is definitely a relationship between the elite recruiting talent and elite results. However, I’m not sure the correlation is as direct for once you get outside of the Top 10. Of course, some would then say, “well, anything but the Top 10 is different shades of average.”

  18. BoKnowsNCS71 02/07/2007 at 3:57 PM #

    I think the x factor which has been left out of all this is the knowledge, skills and talents of the coach and his staff.

  19. stateguy08 02/07/2007 at 3:58 PM #

    bo knows… high school players don’t know shit about football, it’s college where they really develop and learn from coaches. In high school, every top recruit can run over every player, they don’t line up against many players that can half-way compete with them.

  20. BoKnowsNCS71 02/07/2007 at 4:00 PM #

    My point exactly. Coaching must be considered. If one accepts the premise that its just recruits then Wake Forest did not happen last year.

  21. GAWolf 02/07/2007 at 4:00 PM #

    A friend made a good point to me via email today… the football rankings have more of a tendency to be skewed on an individual level because so much of it is left to subjective opinion. In other words, the basketball players play against each other all year long in this camp and that tournament and the recruiting gurus get to see how each measures up directly against his peers. In football, minus the occasional summer camp, you’re not seeing the best guys going up against each other but once a year if at all.

    I hate to sound like Carolina fans did during the early Amato years when they went on and on about recruiting rankings not being an all-inclusive measure of a program’s success because we were “out recruiting them” from a “stars” perspective. However, the point made above is very valid.

    And again I stand by my assertion that I’ll take a two star playing his butt off like a three star over a four star playing half-hearted as a three star. Typically, the four star with the bad attitude or lack of work ethic is the same kid that gets hammered for holding and personal fouls and the such. Not to mention, he’s probably more likely to get in trouble off the field.

    I don’t want to sound like I have sour grapes or I’m trying to justify us not measuring up to the Heels this year. Congrats to Davis and the Heels for bringing in top talent. I’ve long since believed the best thing for NC State football would be for the Heels to grow their national image as well…. assuming that is that we do the same and up the level of overall competition with respect to N.C. football as a whole.

    Just some thoughts…

  22. BoKnowsNCS71 02/07/2007 at 4:05 PM #

    I get and agree with your premise …..but basketball = oranges and football = apples in this thread.

  23. RedTerror29 02/07/2007 at 4:13 PM #

    I don’t think recruiting is any less important for lower-tier programs than for top-tier programs. But I do think the ratings get less reliable the farther down you go. So programs like Boise St. and BC can thrive by picking up genuining talented guys who are under the radar of the recruiting gurus.

  24. statered 02/07/2007 at 4:14 PM #

    This recruiting class for us looks like a MOC/Sheridan special. I am sure we will find some diamonds there as we did in those years but what makes a team good is a good amount of star players and quality depth throughout the program. The lack of it is what prevented Sheridan (who was a quality coach) from breaking through to the next level.

    Lets hope this year is an outlier and not on the mean for us going forward.

  25. class of 74 02/07/2007 at 4:17 PM #

    Rankings do matter but not nearly as much as the coaching staff. That’s why Texas and USC haven’t won everything all of the time. In fact there’s no better example than UF. With all the great recruits in Florida look at how many years they stunk without the proper coach. Then Spurrier shows up and viola a perennial top 5. Ron Zook follows and look at the results. And Zook got the players needed to win no doubt, just look at this years team and it’s predominately Zook’s guys. No sir I’ll give you, personally, the top 25 recruits every year and beat your brains out with a top 5 coaching staff. And history is on my side not yours in this one. Recruiting is important but coaching will trump recruiting EVERYTIME.

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