The Northeast Is Full of Primates
Recruiting concentration varies wildly across the nation - but it doesn't seem to impact how well teams can put up a fence
College football players get recruited from all over America. But they are not evenly disbursed. As we’ve seen before, players nationally tend to be concentrated in a handful of metropolitan areas in only a couple of states. This idea can be extended to measure how geographically concentrated recruits are within a given state, and thus inform how much programs can expect to travel to recruit in a given state. We find that much of the southeast has their recruits well dispersed, while much of the west and northeast are concentrated about a handful of large metros. Interestingly enough, however, we do not see any correlation suggesting that either type of state is more inclined to be controlled by a single program.
In human geography there exists a concept of a primate city. Sometimes that refers to when a city is exclusively governed by chimpanzees, orangutans, and gorillas but absolutely NOT bonobos. In modern use, that definition only applies to London. Everywhere else it refers to a city in a country which is much larger than all other cities and has an outsized cultural, economic, and political influence to the point where it is undeniably the “primary” city in that country. For example, Paris is the primate city of France and Lagos is the primate city of Nigeria. This concept can be easily extended to college football recruiting.
A city is considered a primate city if its population is at least twice as large as the next biggest city in the country. For example, Paris has 5.5x the population as Lyon, and Lagos has 3.7x the population of Kano. We can extend this to recruiting by seeing how many more recruits the largest metro puts out in a state compares to the next largest metro in the state. Since we are mainly interested in the highest level of recruits, we’ll narrow down to competitive recruits which are recruits who have 10+ scholarship offers from Power 4 programs. As an example, since 2021 the Phoenix metro has produced 41 competitive recruits while the Tucson area has only produced 2. Therefore, since Phoenix has over 20x the competitive recruits as Tucson, we can say Phoenix is the primate city of Arizona. But since there’s just not that many competitive recruits in America, the relative primacy values can get out of hand quickly. So instead we’ll express primacy as a percentage. We’ll say Phoenix produced 95% of Arizona’s competitive recruits instead of saying they had 20x as much as Tucson.
This tells us that many more recruits are in Phoenix than anywhere else in Arizona. Thus, if a given program wanted to make it a priority to recruit Arizona, it would make sense for them to focus nearly exclusively on Phoenix. It is a measure of how geographically concentrated recruits are in a given state. Now that we have some way to measure primacy, it will be useful to see what this concentration looks like on a map.
Some clear trends emerge. Outside of Georgia and Tennessee, the southeast appears to not be particularly concentrated. Empirically that just means there’s lots of good players without many cities, but it suggests that it might be difficult for northern and western programs to recruit since it would take major resources to physically traverse the areas. Additionally, every state west of the rockies besides California and most states in the northeast appear to be extremely concentrated within a few predictable cities. The complete absence of FBS players from the northern plains states is always stark to see, but its difficult to see as a market inefficiency since there doesn’t seem to be many players transferring up from those regions. Maps are fun, but let’s see which cities specifically are the most primate.

Salt Lake City is the most primate city in the United States, truly making it a place with waterfalls, unicorns flying, and roofs thatched with gold. If we stick with a simple definition that a primate city is a city which produces 50%+ of a state’s competitive recruits, then there are 14 primate cities on a meaningful sample: Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Washington DC, Little Rock, Phoenix, Nashville, and St. Louis. DC and New York get special callouts as the single biggest producers of talent in multiple states. At a glance, it is difficult to tell whether it is easier to put up a fence around a state which is highly concentrated, or one which is more dispersed.
Theoretically there are sound arguments for both. If a state is extremely concentrated like Utah, then all BYU or UofU have to do is lock down Salt Lake, but there’ll be fierce competition there. If a state is dispersed like Louisiana, LSU could have an easier time knowing where to actually find talent, but it makes it easier for players to slip through the cracks. Let’s test this empirically then and see if we can get a better theoretical grounding. To gauge how well a state is locked down, we’ll look at the largest talent share accumulated by a single program in a state over the last 5 classes.

There does not appear to be any meaningful correlation between how concentrated a given state’s talent is and how well an individual program can “put up a fence.” Arizona and Massachusetts, for example, are extremely concentrated with recruits going to many different schools, while every capable recruit in Oregon becomes a duck. You see the same thing on the other end of the spectrum, with Kentucky and LSU locking down their home states while Virginia remains a fierce battle.
At a glance, the chief factor for how “locked down” a state is appears to be how many programs are competing in it. 3 of the 5 largest talent shares (Arkansas, Nebraska, and Oregon) are really the only show in time for attracting top in-state talent, Kentucky’s in-state rival hasn’t put a particular emphasis in the state in recent years, and LSU has famously guarded its in-state talent better than almost anyone else in America. All of the lowest talent share states (Illinois, Georgia, California, Texas, Florida) either have multiple in-state Power 4 programs, or at least one large city with an easily accessible airport and lots of teams in its exact footprint. We can safely conclude that while the concentration of recruits within a state shapes the form of recruiting within the state, it doesn’t appear to act as a particularly limiting factor for controlling a program’s state.
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