The Best States for High School Football (Updated 2024)

California, Texas, and Florida, right? Everyone argues that their own state had the best football in the country, but I wanted to actually determine with numbers the best states for high school football. In Texas in particular, there are literal books and TV shows and even movies written about high school football, about players and towns we’ve never even heard of.

But does that mean that Texas and these other states actually have the best quality of high school sports?

The answer is definitively no. In fact, the best state for high school football in 2024 is one you might not guess: The best high school football state in 2024 is Mississippi! Take a look at the following heat map showing how each of the top 50 states shapes up.

The best way I saw to compare high school football quality state-to-state is by looking at the quality of talent coming out. And, if we normalize the amount of football talent in each state for how many people actually live there, does the conventional wisdom of the best football states still hold? Spoiler alert: no it doesn’t, not even close.

So, let’s try to go through the data in a meaningful way to try to answer: “What state is the best football state”. If you’re interested, check out our other work on the best high school basketball states.

2024 Best Football States

In the most recent recruiting class, we used our metric to compute which states put out the most college talent per capita. That means bigger states need comparatively more talent to rank as highly. In 2024, the best football states were:

1. Mississippi
2. Kansas
3. Georgia
4. Louisiana
5. Alabama

No wonder the SEC is so good. Now, let’s dig into the meat of our article

Methodology

There are really two ways to compare the quality of high school football among different states. First, we could look at matchups between schools in different states and see who wins most often. Second, we can look at the amount of college-level talent that comes out of different states. We’ll eventually go with the second approach, but let me first explain what is wrong with using the first approach to determine the best states for high school football.

First and most obviously, the vast, vast majority of high school football games are played between teams from the same state. The small number of inter-state matchups simply leads to too little data to infer relationships. Moreover, even if inter-state matchups exist, such games are likely to be between neighboring states. This will make it hard to compare, for instance, Florida and California teams simply because they don’t play each other or any common opponents. Thus, we probably won’t have any explicit data to compare geographically isolated states.

Second, even supposing that we did have a perfect ranking of every team from every state in one list, there are still ambiguities as to what constitutes the best states for high school football. Is it most important to have a few really good teams? Is it most important to make sure that the worst teams in your state are still pretty good? Or should we be comparing the median quality teams in each state?

Because of all these complications, we use our other suggested metric, abundance of college-level talent, in order to determine which are the best states for high school football. To that end, we scraped the available data from 247sports in order to generate a list of every scholarship player at every position in D1 college football in a given year. Then, in order to account for the disparity of comparing, for example, Rhode Island and Texas, we divide the total number of scholarship athletes by the population of a state. Thus, our metric for best football states is essentially “D1 scholarships per million residents”.

In any given year, there are usually about 3,100-3,300 scholarships offered to high school athletes to play division one football in a given year. With a population of about 330 million, that means about one American in 100,000 is offered a D1 college football scholarship in any given year. Thus, a state produces more than their expected number of D1 athletes if they have roughly 10 scholarships per million people. Let’s see how each state in the US stacks up using this metric to determine which states have the best and the worst high school football.

The Best States for High School Football

To determine the current best states for high school football, we counted the number of D1 scholarships awarded to high schoolers in the 2010s years from each state and averaged across those years. The top five states in D1 Scholarships per Million Residents per Year are incredibly surprising to me. Ready?

1. Mississippi: 5 Scholarships per Million
2. Kansas: 3.1 Scholarships per Million
3. Georgia: 2.9 Scholarships per Million
4. Louisiana: 2.41 Scholarships per Million
5. Alabama: 2.40 Scholarships per Million

Texas, California, and Florida don’t show up anywhere on this list. These three states scores are:

• Florida: 1.9 Scholarships per Million
• Texas: 1.9 Scholarships per Million
• California: 1.0 Scholarships per Million

The following graphic shows a heat-map of those states which are the best for high school football and the those which are the worst at high school football.

At this point, I also want to enumerate the worst states for high school football talent. These are:

51) Vermont: 0 Scholarships per Million

50) Maine: 0.1 Scholarships per Million

49) Rhode Island: 0.1 Scholarships per Million

48) New York: 0.1 Scholarships per Million

47) North Dakota: 0.2 Scholarships per Million

In addition to these five abysmal high school football states, one particularly disappointing state to me is New York. New York only has 0.1 D1 scholarships per million residents, per year. Traditionally, NYC is viewed as a basketball city, but this amount of achievement is still very low for the state containing the largest metro area in our country.

Best High School Football States by Position

I decided to go a step further and break down the totals by position. Perhaps some states tend to output more quarterbacks than other positions. Perhaps others tend to output more lineman than others. Below, we divided all the positions into four different groups: QB, Lineman, Defensive Backs, and Offensive Skills Players. Then, we ranked all the states by the amount of high school talent at each of these position groups. The table below has the top five and bottom five states for high school football talent at each position group.

Rank	QB	Line	DB	WR/RB
1	Mississippi	Mississippi	Mississippi	Mississippi
2	DC	Kansas	Kansas	Louisiana
3	Georgia	DC	DC	DC
4	Alabama	Georgia	Georgia	Kansas
5	Kansas	Alabama	Louisiana	Georgia
⫶	⫶	⫶	⫶	⫶
47	South Dakota	Rhode Island	Delaware	North Dakota
48	Delaware	Delaware	Montana	South Dakota
49	Montana	Montana	Rhode Island	Montana
50	Rhode Island	Maine	New Hampshire	New Hampshire
51	Maine	Vermont	Maine	Maine

Notice that there isn’t a ton of variety from position group to position group. What this says to me is that states with a good football culture tend to produce players at all positions. There is a fairly strongly perpetuated myth that midwestern farm boys make for great linemen. If that were the case, then we would see dominant recruiting of lineman from the Midwest and plains states. However, looking at the graphics below we can see that this is simply not the case.

While there are certainly differences between the different position groups, the differences are simply not dramatic enough to make strong conclusions of the form “the midwest produces great talent in the trenches”.

The only conclusion that I choose to make from the above charts is that I now understand better why the SEC dominates in football year after year. The homegrown talent effect is real.

Historical Best States for High School Football

The data shown above is aggregated from 2017-2024. The recruit tracking website 247sports has data back to the early 2000’s. We did the same thing as above for the 2000 recruiting class to see if any major changes to the best high school football states exist. Did the dawn of the internet allow coaches and scouts to find more diamonds in the rough in rural areas? Or, did changing population dynamics impact our results in some other way? Well, here is the graphic showing the best high school football states in 2000 based on recruiting numbers.

Myself, I don’t see any differences between this graphic and the corresponding graphic aggregating. Some states did see some notable changes in their ranking, though, from 2000 to 2021. In particular the following five states improved their ranking the most from the 2000 recruiting class to the 2021 high school recruiting class:

1. District of Columbia: +31 spots
2. Iowa: +19 spots
3. Michigan: +15 spots
4. North Carolina: +14 spots
5. Indiana: +14 spots

And, the following five states decreased their rankings the most from the 2000 to the 2021 recruiting class out of high school football:

1. California: -21 spots
2. New Jersey: -19 spots
3. Colorado: -17 spots
4. West Virginia: -17 spots
5. Delaware: -14 spots

Best and Worst Football States without Population Normalization

Finally, instead of normalizing the number of D1 college recruits, I wanted to give Texas, Florida, and California their undue credit as high school football states. In reality, these three states do, in general, generate the most college football talent. But when you realize that almost a quarter of the country lives in one of these three states, it becomes much less impressive. Shown in the graphic below are the best states for high school football when we rank by raw numbers of total D1 scholarships per year not normalizing for total population.

The top 5 states that produce the most total high school football talent unnormalized for population are:

1. Texas: 362 Scholarships
2. Florida: 272 Scholarships
3. Georgia: 208 Scholarships
4. California: 202 Scholarships
5. Ohio: 112 Scholarships

And, the bottom five worst states for high school football talent by total number of D1 scholarships in 2021.

T48) New Hampshire, Vermont, Delaware, Maine: 0 Scholarships

T43) Wyoming, Alaska, North/South Dakota, Rhode Island, Montana: 1 Scholarship

Conclusions

By our measure, the list of best high school football states goes pretty strongly against the conventional wisdom. Most folks think that Florida, Texas, and California are king when it comes to high school football. But in reality, these three states only produce the massive number of recruits they do by virtue of being the three largest states in the country.

In reality, the deep south states tend to sit a tier above the others when it comes to scholarships per capita. In almost every way imaginable, Mississippi is king and should take the crown as the best high school football state in the country.

To see an identical analysis to determine the best high school basketball states, see our other post here.

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