FanPost

Highly Rated Defensive Line Recruits (Part 1)

Dale Zanine-USA TODAY Sports

Some of y'all may remember a while back in the season when someone asked for a breakdown of all of the 4- and 5-star defensive line recruits, where they were from, where they ended up, what their majors are, and how much they've contributed. I volunteered for the task of obtaining the answers, and went through every class 2011-2015, and compiled as much of that information as I could find. It became a massive amount of data, so I'm going to break it down into a few parts, so people can actually read the info.

First, the totals. As I said, I went through every class since 2011, and here's what I found (all ratings are according to Rivals.com):

5-star DT 4-star DT 5-star WDE 4-star WDE 5-star SDE 4-star DE
2011 1 28 2 8 2 20
2012 5 17 3 18 3 14
2013 4 21 2 14 3 12
2014 1 21 2 13 2 16
2015 3 19 1 10 3 19

So across 5 recruiting classes, that gives us a total of 36 5-star defensive linemen, and 233 4-star defensive linemen.

The biggest part of this aggregation is to see where these guys are from and where they are going. The argument has been made that Georgia Tech doesn't have much of a chance at these guys for a multitude of reasons, not the least of which has been geography. It was theorized that most of these kids want to stay in their home state. Well, the numbers don't quite bear that out. Here's a look at states producing the most 4- and 5-star defensive linemen in the country, and how location was related to their college decisions. (Note: Most states produced no more than 8 4- or 5-star recruits during the last 5 years.)

States Producing Most 4- and 5-star DL from 2011-2015
State Count Stayed In-State In-State %
Georgia 35 14 40%
Texas 31 21 68%
Florida 29 22 76%
California 28 16 57%
Ohio 14 9 64%
Virginia 14 5 36%
North Carolina 13 4 31%
Nationwide Total 269 134 50%

Now, the question becomes "where are these kids going?" Here's the breakdown by conference:

Conference Count
SEC 94
ACC 46
B1G 42
Pac-12 33
Big XII 24
Notre Dame 9
Non-Power 5 4

And here are the schools with the most top-rated defensive line recruits over the past 5 recruiting cycles:

School 4- & 5-star DL Signed
Ohio State 15
uga 15
FSU 14
Alabama 13
Tennessee 10
Texas A&M 10
Notre Dame 9
Miami 9
LSU 9
Florida 9
USC 8
UCLA 8
Texas 8

So, it would appear that it's as close to 50/50 as it gets on whether a player will leave their home state to play football. The states with more schools predictably have more kids staying in-state, and the states with just one major school in their state turned out to (also predictably) have a monopoly on their state's top recruits.

In the second part of this series, I'm going to lay out academics and football contributions for each of the 5-star linemen. I may do the same in a third part for the 233 4-star guys, but researching just 36 5-star recruits took me this long, and the information we want isn't as prevalent as you would hope. Most schools don't even list the majors of their players, let alone their academic achievements. Hopefully this will give us a better idea of how many of the pool of top recruits would be available to Tech to recruit.

Thanks for reading if you made it this far!

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