It’s coming down to the home stretch for the 2016 recruiting cycle, with National Signing Day only a week away. Several teams are still jockeying for the top overall class this year, and almost all of them will be trying to close down on some five-star recruits, a number of which remain uncommitted.
There is a 1.5 million square mile recruiting wasteland without any 2016 5-star recruits
I’m beginning to sense a trend here.
It turns out those five-stars all live in basically the same few places, according to the 247Sports Composite, leaving the rest of the country as a veritable five-star recruit desert.
Almost all of the five-stars in this class are clustered in either the southeast, mid-atlantic, or the west coast. That means that inside the 1,664,743.89 square mile shaded are on this precisely drawn map, there is not one single five-star recruit to be found.
Obviously recruiting ratings aren’t perfect. Some kids take a while to develop, some are under-scouted, and some highly-rated kids just don’t pan out. But five-star recruits are the ones your team should more often than not be trying to get, and that becomes a problem when you’re one of the many schools in this middle area that have to travel outside your home footprint to get to them.
And, perhaps not-so-coincidentally, nearly all the teams still trying to grab that top recruiting class this year all live close to where the five-stars are.
* * *
