Biggest recruiting hotbeds: Florida
EDITOR’S NOTE: In an 11-part series, Saturday Down South contributor Gary Laney looks at the states in the SEC and what areas in those states produce the most players, per capita. The method was to count players who have earned at least a four-star rating from 247Sports’ composite rankings, because that ranking takes into account the rankings of all the recruiting services. We then calculate how many of these blue chip recruits each metro area has produced per capita over a five-year period from 2012-16. At the end, we’ll rank the 10 biggest hotbeds in SEC country in per capita player production.
Ole Miss. Ohio State. Georgia. Auburn. LSU. Clemson. Tennessee. USC.
Going down the list of the top prep players in the state of Florida in 2016, one could find a who’s who of high-powered college football programs from outside the Sunshine State that went to Florida and successfully lured the prospect away. The same is true every year for one of the states that’s truly the breadbasket of college football.
Starving for players? Send some recruiters to Miami, one of the sport’s great prospect hotbeds. From a state where the players tend to be a step slow? Start recruiting Florida and you can make up for athleticism deficiencies in a hurry.
Yet, the state still has plenty enough talent to support three programs in Florida, Florida State and Miami that annually can be counted on to provide at least one, and often more, national championship contenders.
The key to that? They keep players from perhaps the nation’s most talent-rich state (with the possible exception of Texas) home. Where in the state do they come from? Look below to see:
Note: sorted by per capita production (the “Rural” category was left for last):
| METRO AREA | SIZE | PER CAPITA | 5 STARS | 4 STARS |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tallahassee | 375,750 | 1/37,570 | 0 | 10 |
| *Bradenton-Sarasota | 748,708 | 1/46,794 | 2 | 14 |
| Jacksonville | 1,420,000 | 1/67,600 | 4 | 17 |
| Ocala | 339,000 | 1/67,800 | 0 | 5 |
| Miami-Ft. Lauderdale | 5,930,000 | 1/78,000 | 11 | 65 |
| Lakeland | 635,000 | 1/79,375 | 1 | 7 |
| Naples | 349,000 | 1/87,250 | 0 | 4 |
| Panama City | 195,000 | 1/97,500 | 1 | 1 |
| Palm Bay-Melbourne | 557,000 | 1/111,400 | 0 | 5 |
| Daytona Beach | 610,000 | 1/122,000 | 0 | 5 |
| Orlando | 2,3200,000 | 1/122,100 | 1 | 18 |
| Vero Beach | 145,000 | 1/145,000 | 0 | 1 |
| Tampa-St. Petersburg | 5,700,000 | 1/211,111 | 6 | 21 |
| Cape Coral-Fort Myers | 679,513 | 1/226,500 | 0 | 3 |
| Pensacola | 474,000 | 1/237,000 | 0 | 2 |
| Fort Walton-Destin | 258,000 | 1/258,000 | 0 | 1 |
| Port St. Lucie | 444,420 | 1/444,420 | 0 | 1 |
| Gainesville | 273,377 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Punta Gorda | 168,000 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Palm Coast | 102,408 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Rural | – | – | 0 | 6 |
Three Things to Know
- State of Miami: Not many urban programs can say this, but if Miami is ever able to secure all its metro area prospects, it can almost fill its roster with four- and five-star recruits. That’s the challenge for Hurricanes coach Mark Richt, who in his first season saw five of the top six metro prospects leave the area for other programs. If he’s ever able to reverse that trend, Richt could easily put Miami back on the map. Of course, he’d just be following the longtime blueprint Howard Schnellenberger created in the late 1970s, when he coined the term “putting a fence around” an area of southern Florida he called “The state of Miami.”
- The IMG asterisk: The asterisk above next to Bradenton is because of IMG Academy, which has become the first prep football “super program” in the mold of the basketball academies that preceded it (and the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy, which produced players like Andre Agassi and Monica Seles and eventually evolved into the multi-sport IMG). Is it fair to count Shea Patterson, the Louisiana quarterback who transferred to IMG for his senior year, as being a Florida prospect? How about Isaac Nauta, the tight end from Georgia who opted to return home to play for the Dawgs after one year at IMG? So take those statistics with a grain of salt.
- Put a fence around … Tallahassee?: While Miami has the advantage in pure numbers, Tallahassee has been an efficient player producer with at least two four-star prospects each year for the last four years, an impressive list for a metro area under 400,000 people. Nearby Crawfordville, Fla., produced two four-star players in 2016. So maybe the beginning of FSU’s success starts with a fence around the state capital.
Program to know
Sure, IMG is now the prospect capitol of America, but short of a football factory like that, the dominant program has been St. Thomas Aquinas of Fort Lauderdale. The Raiders led all high schools with 17 players on NFL rosters at the beginning of the 2015 season, an amazing number. That number should keep growing with more blue chippers coming out of the program, like the state’s No. 2 player in 2016, Nick Bosa (who followed brother Joey to Ohio State).
They said it
“I kind of take pride on that we taught the state how to win the national championship. I just didn’t realize (Florida and Florida State) were such slow learners. We had to win it four times before they figured it out.” — former Miami coach Howard Schnellenberger, who built the ‘Canes into a powerhosue by emphasizing local recruiting in a TV interview. Miami was the first state program to build a powerhouse using mostly local talent.
