The 2016 College Football Recruiting Class

Yesterday was National Signing Day -the college football equivalent of showing off your sparkling new engagement ring to anyone who’ll look. These days, lots of people like looking. High School seniors the nation over sign commitments to, and awkwardly wear caps of, their new homes for the next four-ish years.

Here is a map of the hometowns of the 300 top-rated football recruits this year:

Of course I can’t help but wonder what the Air Mile Index would be for the top-recruiting schools.

The Air Mile Index is what happens when a nerd is interested in college football recruiting. If you measure the distance from a recruit’s hometown to their new team (then take the square root of that), and average the whole lot of them, you get the Air Mile Index. Pretty much a unit-less measure describing how many air miles the assistant coaching staff racked up over the year. 30 is an insanely big recruiting footprint; 12 is a really local recruiting footprint.

On ESPN, I found the rankings of the 2016 recruiting classes. And I was pretty pleased to see that Michigan landed the nation’s top recruit. Anyway, here are ESPN’s top ten schools, as of 2/3/2016 (I notice the next day, Texas bumped Florida out of the top ten, but whatevs). I’ve drawn the flight lines and tallied up the AMI for each…

(also, if you are feeling adventurous, you can explore these team AMIs in a clicky-clicky, all the stats you want, interactive map)

Florida State