Our recruiting footprint

Every now and then I get this weird itch to put a bunch of stuff in excel. I'm enjoying a quarantine at the moment, so it was as good of a time as any to break one out.

In recent press conferences and media posts, it has been implied that we won't be throwing darts past the Mississippi. Maps circulated showing a six hour driving radius from Blacksburg.

Since I'm not going to get exact on the driving radius relative to a recruit's location, this post is just about driving into a state.

In the 22 cycle there are 377 composite 4 star or higher recruits.
Alabama 15
Alaska 0
Arizona 5
Arkansas 4
California 29
Colorado 2
Connecticut 0
Delaware 0
DC 0
Florida 48
Georgia 32
Hawaii 1
Idaho 1
Illinois 7
Indiana 9
Iowa 4
Kansas 1
Kentucky 3
Louisiana 15
Maine 0
Maryland 8
Massachusetts 2
Michigan 9
Minnesota 2
Mississippi 8
Missouri 8
Montana 0
Nebraska 3
Nevada 7
New Hampshire 0
New Jersey 4
New Mexico 0
New York 1
North Carolina 11
North Dakota 0
Ohio 13
Oklahoma 9
Oregon 2
Pennsylvania 12
Rhode Island 0
South Carolina 5
South Dakota 0
Tennessee 13
Texas 53
Utah 6
Vermont 0
Virginia 13
Washington 6
West Virginia 0
Wisconsin 5
Wyoming 0
International 1

We can reach these states within six hours: Delaware, DC, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia. That gives us access to the state of 110, or just over 29.1% of the blue chip recruits.

Increasing our radius to 9 hours adds the following states: Alabama, Indiana, Michigan, New Jersey, and New York. This adds an additional 38 blue chips, or a hair over 10% of the total.

Totaling those two, we have access to a little over 39.2% of the blue chip recruits for the 22 cycle.

Historically, we have done well to chase Florida. If you add in Florida's 48 blue chip recruits, that brings our total to almost 52% of the 2022 blue chip recruits.

Access doesn't equate to success. But, if we are going to limit ourselves to a certain range, then we have to know what's available and set expectations accordingly. 6 hours is not bad at all. The 9 hour radius doesn't really give us access to additional states I expect us to pull recruits from. It does put us deeper into states like Georgia. Focusing on the six hour radius and adding in flights to Florida gives us solid access to over 41.9%. The extra drive time into Georgia is probably worth the squeeze.