Does UGA Control Georgia Recruiting So Much That Tech Must Look Elsewhere?
ACC teams pulled in an impressive haul on National Signing Day last month, but with so many conference schools located in states/general regions that overlap with (current and future) Big Ten and SEC schools’ territories, it can be a real uphill slog to lock down local recruits. For some schools like Georgia Tech (14th ranked class out of 15 in the ACC), the overriding opinion is that their own home state, Georgia, may be lost for good to the likes of rival Georgia, and perhaps Georgia State in the future, so why not “go national?“
As a key football brand, there’s not doubt the ‘Wreck will ultimately find success leaving the state of Georgia. But for other schools, they can’t afford a bad recruiting class to tell them now is the time to alter course. This year in particular, several schools actually went on the offensive, grabbing some of their best players from bordering states (and in turn, rival institutions from other conferences).
To help frame the conversation, I’ve enlisted our own Hokie Mark (who runs his own ACCFootballRx site along with the work he helps with here) to parse through his immense collection of recruiting data, and give us a starting point. From Mark’s companion piece on ACC schools losing in-state recruits, here’s how we’ll be classifying states:
ACC-Exclusive States: Massachusetts, North Carolina, New York, Virginia
Battleground States: Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, South Carolina
Border States: Alabama, Connecticut, Washington D.C., Indiana, Maryland, New Jersey, Ohio, Tennessee
In “Border States,” there were a total of 68 players who received a four- or five-star rating from Rivals.com (we’ll be using this for consistency, and because that’s where Mark’s data is from). Of those 68, here’s how the recruits were broken down (by conference):
ACC: 9
B1G: 26
Big 12: 2
Notre Dame: 2
Pac-12: 3
SEC: 24
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