Great Read On Northeast Football Recruiting

Ryan Myerberg of Pre-Snap Read breaks down historical trends for college football recruiting in the Northeast.

Here's what he had to say about Massachusetts ...

Massachusetts has produced four blue chip recruits in the past five years, which is really poor. The sad part is that Boston College has been consistently strong over that period, and certainly going back far longer than that. Two of those four recruits did stay to play in-state, one to the Eagles and one to the Crimson of Harvard, so I guess that is a good thing, but the fact of the matter remains that the further north we go, the more states struggle at keeping top performers at home. Here’s the kicker: the per capita numbers are tremendously bad — one recruit for every 1,648,397 people. Why does the state, with over 6.5 million people, do so poorly with producing top recruits? I wish I knew. Maybe Massachusetts is just a baseball state?

And Connecticut ...

Connecticut has produced 10 four star recruits in the past five years, according to Rivals.com. None have stayed home to play for the in-state Huskies. To be honest, I’m not sure I can really blame them. I have a lot of respect for Randy Edsall, and the job he’s done with UConn has been very impressive. But I can tell you that the state of Connecticut does not have a legacy in following major college football — though Yale versus Harvard on the F.C.S. level is always a game to watch. Since Connecticut is a small state both geographically and in population, the per capita numbers are bad, but not painfully bad: one top recruit for every 351,829 people in the Constitution State.

And the rest of New England. Rhode Island, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine. Not exactly known as a college football recruiting hot bed ...

As one would expect, the four remaining states of the Northeast and the heart of New England - Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont - do not produce top-flight college football talent. In fact, just one solitary recruit with a blue-chip ranking from Rivals.com has moved onto an F.B.S. school in the past five years. This recruit, from New Hampshire, did choose a New England school to call home for the four to five years of his college career - Boston College in this case.

Pre-Snap read also breaks down the college football landscape for New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, other states where BC has done a decent job of recruiting the past few years.