We did the Geographic Centers of All Division 1 Rosters to find the Most "Hometown" Teams!THE TOP 10 HOMETOWN TEAMS IN FBSCONGRATS @TXSTATEFOOTBALL https://t.co/fb5gzY95qo pic.twitter.com/5H7F3w0YEC— Sickos Committee (@SickosCommittee) August 26, 2025
Remember when we wanted to get rid of all the other recruiting pitches and just focus on getting players close to home? Well, we can now officially say we've done it. With an average distance of 14 miles from campus to the high school of our players, we have the #2 rated roster in the country according to our own plan, with only Texas St being ranked higher! We did it!
As a serious aside, I hope this shows that we can't just go all in on one thing or another when it comes to recruiting, especially in the NIL era. You have to be adaptable, you have to be able to pivot on the fly and challenge your own preferences in order to build out the best rosters you can. Hopefully after the BoV approves permanent funding levels at or around the Clemson's of the world, we won't have to be so suffocatingly insular with all of our efforts and we can start branching out again.
I'll repeat what I said the other day in another thread. This insular focus hasn't just been on football, it seems to have been across the board when it comes to even Hokie Club outreach. In Raleigh up until about 10 years ago we used to be included with the annual speaking tour of coaches and staff for fundraising opportunities, usually coinciding with 1, and in many years, 2 golf tournaments, the biggest of which hosted at a country club owned by one of our wealthier donors. Once we pivoted away from the whole NC2VT or TX2VT movements, they got rid of the annual stops down here and only focused on Virginia. Even for the Duke game last year, it was the first time since we joined the ACC that the school didn't bother helping us work something out to get an official alumni tailgate. From our perspective, VT just doesn't care about our involvement anymore, which I have to suspect has echoes elsewhere given the NC Triangle has one of, if not the highest (at one point it was the highest, but its been a while since I saw the data) concentration of VT alumni outside the Commonwealth.
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im missing something, there aren't enough highschools in 14 miles for this to be true.
wait are they finding the center of all our players then comparing it? Cause that just means we recruit on all directions and being the mid Atlantic it kind of helps that.
I had to re-read the post to figure it out. But I think its saying if you take a mean geographic coordinates of every player we have on the roster and have a resulting "center", and compare that the geographic coordinates to that of the university, our "center" is 14 miles from campus. That doesn't say anything about the radius from that center... could be 10 miles, 100, or 1000...
I was read that as: distance from the geographic weighted center of all rostered players to the stadium. Not the average distance of all players to the stadium.
I wonder, how is it weighted, by the players' weight? ;^)
Its all the same
Just the ones that rhyme with Kevin.
weights weigh the same.
For every Australia, you need like 3 Salems to balance
no, it's geographic center so Salem and Australia world have a center in Africa
except for we are 68 degrees north of Australia so the center would be very odd as it crosses over the poles.
Yes and yes. It's just dumb luck in geography and being far enough west that that the heavy number of recruits east of VT balance out the long distance of recruits from Texas. Any school actually on a coast like Miami and BC have no chance of having a geometric center near them.
Notice how many highly successful teams are on this list....
Chicken and Egg - highly successful teams can nationally recruit more effectively
cc @Alum07
I think you're conflating a lot of different things here.
To be fair, wasn't our goal to only recruit within a certain radius of campus? So, I'll still stick with it
What a weird metric. It seems to really just indicate how balanced your recruiting radius is and doesn't even comment on the size of the radius. Which I guess in a roundabout way shows that only small time programs that can't pull elite national recruits have a balanced radius because that radius is small. Yes, we're officially small time.
Or it just shows that we're located equidistantly from a variety of metro areas 🤷
For me, it's as equally illuminating as someone realizing we're the only D-I football team who doesn't have a player with a last name starting with "P". (I'm not saying that is a fact, just using it as a ridiculous stat example)
Every year this metric should vary wildly and lends no insight to quality of recruiting.
Weird metric for sure. But yeah, it shows that the Beamer way of recruiting the six-hour radius does not work anymore in this day and age in college football. Pry had better be able to pivot quickly. A lot of money and energy spent on doing things they way they were done 20-30 years ago.
For those making the argument that 'our recruiting radius is too small, thus we are small time' - this data is readily available on On3 Recruiting pages. Here's VT's On3 page for 2026. Here's a grab bag of school:
The issue has zero to do with our radius, and much, much more to do with the quality of recruit we're landing.
These are completely different sample sets. The data they reported is for the current roster, which is over 100 players. The 2026 commits aren't on campus yet and we only have 11. The reason our average distance is so much larger for our 2026 commitments is because we have a QB committee from Louisiana. Everyone else is from VA, DC, NC, or SC.
2025 Distance was 237.6 miles which is lower than all but one of those 2026 numbers posted here. I am not on computer to put the 2025 ACC distance list together.
Yea, point stands - recruiting radius isn't the issue. If we landed the top 10 recruits in VA and NC each year, our average radius would probably <200 miles, and our bluechip ratio would probably be ~40%.
But we don't land those folks.