recruiting data breakdown

I mentioned on another thread that I was going to try to map out some geographic hot spots for recruiting in Virginia and break it down via GIS into several maps, whether it be the sheer number of players, the amount of players that eventually became starters from each region, the amount of starters per recruit from a region and so on (I plan on exporting about 11 maps by the time this is all said and done)

that being said I just finished collecting data from the 2002 recruiting class (rival's first year on the map) and I thought id share some interesting info with you guys at least some stats I find kind of interesting.

First ill lay out my process, and please feel free to critique my process but this is what ive got. I set up an excel sheet with each player's name, his hometown, his school, stars of his recruitment, years started, all conference honors in college, all American honors in college, and individual accolades (all of which will be used in a final equation to help the program figure out which locations are more favorable for certain statistics). I used rivals to get the list of football players within the state and I wound up with about 87 (a decent sample size) and used their recruitment data. From there I googled each player one by one to figure out what they did in their college careers and figure out all of their accolades and heres what I found (note this was when UVA was actually relevant...sorta....well not really only in their own minds)

24 D1 programs recruited the sample size I tested which included 5 5-stars, 17 4-stars, and 27-3 stars, then a jumbled mess of smaller lesser known recruits.

you might recognize a few of these 5 star recruits

Marcus Vick
Ahmad Brooks
Kai Parham

and you might not recognize the other two

Damian Spradlin
Marquis Elmore

those two never even became starters. in other news, among the 17-4 stars, only 6 became starters for whatever reason, but those that did were typically 2-3 year starters. the three stars? 14 were starters, although it seemed like linemen and occasionally linebackers were the ones that landed the long term starting jobs. Do stars mean something? yes, the 4 star players that started 2-3 years were also impact players and team captains some names include jonathan lewis and Levi Brown....if you don't know who levi brown is please look him up the guy was a monster. Also these numbers are skewed a little against the 4 stars, because for some unexplainable reason UGA and UVA (well that ones explainable...) could not develop their 4 stars. UGA got 3 all from fork union, as well as one 5 star from the same place, and none of them even started. EVER. UVA had a little more success, one of their 4 stars turned into a second team all-acc LB but aside from that...it was a lot of the same for UVA.

The power recruiters in-state....yep you guessed it!!! us

21 Virginia tech

followed by

13 UVA

what relevance this has, I do not know, but man we had some kickass safeties in this class, and a few WRs too that got buried in the depth chart and still managed to make the NFL. (Josh Hyman) we also had Darryl tap, and the only punter that can even come close to eclipsing AJ Hughes in Nic Schmitt. the steal of the class was definitely Gaines Adams from Fork Union. The guy was an absolute monster in college once he got his chance, and was a good pro too until his untimely passing. Tech also got a few diamonds one in particular in Jimmy Williams.

If you guys would like me to keep updating you on what I find as I continue my research into recruiting feel free to comment, I'm curious as to how things start playing out once the sample size increases