A Deep Dive Into California Recruiting
College football is a game of talent acquisition. The best teams on the field typically are the teams that have acquired the most talent through recruiting off the field. Look no further than Alabama. Over the last fourteen recruiting cycles, Alabama has pulled in the #1 ranked class a total of ten times, never falling further than the fifth best class. Nick Saban set the standard for high school recruiting. What came with that? 6 National Championships and 9 title game appearances in that time. Even outside of Alabama, since the talent composite sites started ranking players and teams, there has not been a team win a national championship who did not break the blue chip threshold. This still holds true with the most recent champion Michigan, just barely keeping the streak alive with a 52% blue chip ratio. Talent acquisition is the name of the game in this sport.
Most of these blue chippers (4 or 5 star recruits) come from the big three - Texas, Florida and California. Seems to be logical as these three states are the most populated states in the country, that this is where the most talent lies. This has been true up until recently. One of the big three is slipping. That being California. Over the past 5-10 years, California has been declining in producing top tier blue chip talent while Georgia has been on a vicious growth cycle pushing California out of the top three, despite having nearly half the population.
There are two angles I want to focus on when addressing California recruiting. The first being the decline in talent production from the Golden State overall and secondly, the role of the four major California Universities have played in keeping talent in state.
Let’s start with the raw talent coming out of the state. Really since about 2016, Georgia has been clawing it’s way to take over market share of top tier talent from California. Even with it’s disadvantages in population, Georgia has been regularly pumping out 20+ blue chippers per year, some years breaking into the 30's like the most recent cycle. That’s good enough to plant them in the top three with Texas and Florida. The biggest surge has been around the greater Atlanta area with Buford High School leading the way. Just less than an hour from downtown Atlanta, Buford High School alone produced three of the top 4 ranked recruits in the state, all of them being 5 star recruits. Granted Raiola came from Arizona, he did play out his senior year in Georgia. Now California has these behemoths as well with Mater Dei and St. John Bosco. Those two schools pump out blue chippers every year. However, while Southern California is still a hot bed for recruiting and talent, they’ve begun to take a back seat to Georgia and other regions on the rise. This is most particularly evident with the hog-mollies up front. California recently has been known to produce skill players with very few defensive and offensive lineman. This is a large reason for the decline in overall talent in California while other regions in the south have a more balanced talent pool.
Let’s set aside the decline in overall talent over the past decade. California is still among the top 4 states in the country for production. This is still an extremely talent rich state. Most state universities would drool to have this talent in their backyard. This leads me to my second point. The four major universities in California have done a lousy job of keeping talent in state. A large part of that is that the sport has had a large spotlight on the south and some major programs in the mid west. Let’s call them the “Power 2” conferences in the Big Ten and the SEC. Since the run of Pete Carroll’s USC teams in the early 2000’s, the titles have run through the south largely. These players know that, so that hurts these California universities, however they have done a sub par job at selling playing for your home state. Now recently this has gotten harder but I’m focusing on the past ten years. California schools have been struggling to keep talent home for quite a while now. In the 2024 class, 8 of the top 100 players come from California. None of them are committed to a California University. Of the top 25 recruits in the state, only four of them are staying in state, with three being at USC.
California has USC, UCLA, Stanford and Cal as four major schools in the state that compete at the power 5 level. Let’s look at Florida as a comparison. Florida has three major universities competing at that level in Florida, Florida State and Miami. So one less major player competing for the same in state talent. In the 2024 cycle, Florida has 13 top 100 players (5 more than California), 5 of which are staying in state compared to California’s zero. On top of that, of the state’s top 25 recruits, 14 of them are staying in state. Norvell, Cristobal and Napier have done a fabulous job of keeping these kids home.
As recruiting has become more “national”, especially in the transfer portal era, California has done a poor job of holding on to their top tier talent whereas Florida and Texas have continued to thrive. This has led to these California programs struggles over the past decade. In the last ten years in the Pac 12 for these schools (2014-2023), a California school has one the conference twice, the last time being USC in 2017. Despite making up a quarter of the conference between the four schools, they have only been able to produce two championships over the last decade. This has also been a conference that has been considered one of the weakest in the Power 5 over this time span. A lot of this has to do with keeping talent in state.
With Cal and Stanford heading to the ACC, it might be even tougher for Wilcox and Taylor to keep kids home. Now, UCLA and USC heading to the Big Ten may help in their recruiting as they now get to sell playing conference games in one of the best, if not the best league in the sport. We’ll see how Riley and (at the moment), Chip Kelly adapt to the new world.
