The best path to recruiting success for PSU remains in PA, plus NJ, OH occasionally, and the DMV area, with some efforts in FL also. That was the footprint of the very successful 2022 Class.
Nope. Too restrictive, especially since Pa quality has declined. They need to scour the country side to get what they can. Getting even two or three top players can have a dramatic impact.
And Virginia, and occasionally NY/New England..... The roster has some great players from MD and VA right now. Try and dominate the North-East, and supplement from FL, TX and the south when opportunities present themselves.
In Massachusetts the last several years there have been four or five blue chip recruits per year. Other than freiermuth, we have gotten none. There are a lot of Penn State alums here in Massachusetts but we seem to lose recruits to Notre Dame and Michigan quite often. Need to hit Boston area more I think. We did go after Lewis Cine, But he ended up at Georgia after transferring to IMG
I think it's probably the Jacksons, Grants and Franklins.
Agreed. We have to do better in the region. we get a lot of good players out of MD and VA. We miss a lot in NJ and NY. Ohio should be better as any kid that doesn't want to play for tOSU (or is left out) should be big on our list. We've done much better in Michigan in the last few years as well. Other than that, I can see TX, FL and AL just because of the number of good kids they feed into the system. tOSU has killed it in TX recently. So, we need to focus more regionally and Eastern USA as a secondary plan. In FL and TX, you will compete with every major program in the nation.
23 composite:
Is that an actually very large talent difference, or at least partly attributable to the travel preferences of recruiting guru types?
Agree..and these rankings are kind of incestuous. The more offers you get from AL, GA, Clemson, FL, Miami, LSU, TX, Ok, USC, Oregon, W..the higher your ranking. The higher your ranking, the more offers you get. There are always teams like TCU, Baylor and OK St that jump up and substantially outperform their recruiting ranking. But what we see is, a handful of teams simply reload on great recruits.
When you are recruited to play football first and to hell with real classes, Penn State loses every time.
The # of 5 stars per state is surprising, given the populations of the states involved. 2021 estimates of population per state as follows:
I thought the general attitude in this chat room was that PSU doesn't want to be like the Ala, Ga., OSU, A&M, Oklahoma, Texas, USC, and Clemson... win at all costs. If that is the case, just win your kingdom. Its no surprise that almost all of the the elite teams, but for O$U, are from those fertile regions
Rivals seems to like the warm weather players.
Bama’s football “recruiting” is like PSU’s wrestling recruiting. Neither really “recruits”, they just select.
Michigan has also raided top players from PA/ NJ going back to Chad Henne and more recently the DT Rashan Gary from Jersey. Both would have really helped us....
But a bum whose only interest is solely football will never choose Penn State.
Yep, and most years it seems that UM gets a good player or two from the New England area.
Penn State's recruiting Class of 2022 appears to be elite, championship level.
Three quarters of our board buys into that propaganda. South slanted for stars. I'd rather concentrate my efforts into Texas, and midwest linemen.
If you look at the staple of those Alabama NC teams, their defenses all centered around the DL.
