Rivals Top 100: Where the Talent Comes From

Rivals Top 100: Where the Talent Comes From

Renowned recruiting service Rivals.com publishes a top 100 rankings among a host of other informative lists about the high school class of 2018. We're digging deep into that data to get a better idea of where these recruits are coming from.

Jun 29, 2017 by Willie Saylor
Rivals Top 100: Where the Talent Comes From
Renowned recruiting service Rivals.com publishes a top 100 rankings among a host of other informative lists about the high school class of 2018.

We're digging deep into that data to get a better idea of where the very best college football recruits are coming from.

To build a heat map, we assigned a point value to all 100 ranked recruits. The No. 1-ranked recruit got 100 points, and the No. 2-ranked recruit got 99 points and so on. We then grouped the recruits by their home states and added up all the points scored for each state. The heat map generated from the data can be found below.
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To the surprise of very few, Florida is clearly the top state when it comes to producing coveted scholarship-caliber football players.

We graphed the same data to clarify how all the states stacked up against each other. That graph is below.

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The biggest states in the southern parts of the country lead the way as usual.

Finally, if you want to explore the Rivals data even further, visit here to get to an interactive map where you can go even deeper into the top 100 recruits of the class of 2018.