The map below shows 90 years of D-I football recruiting history. To roughly limit the map to highly-recruited players rather than walk-ons and role players, the map only shows players who were on an NFL roster at some point in their careers. The date filter shows the previous eight recruiting classes (e.g., if the filter is set to 2000, the map shows those classes recruited from 1993 to 2000). The toggles on the right allow you to switch between current conference and historic conference alignments.

Notes: Shades for player counts are determined on a log scale. Historic conference alignments are determined by the date that each player was recruited. For example, if a player was recruited by Virginia Tech in 2000, that player would be considered a Big East recruit if the historic conference alignment filter is selected, and an ACC player if the current conference alignment filter is selected. Because conference alignment data isn't available prior to 1965, conferences from 1920 to 1965 are assumed to be the same as in 1965. Players are assumed to have been recruited four years prior to the start of their NFL careers.

Sources: Player data from 1920 to 2000 is was provided by DatabaseFootball.com; data from 2000 to 2009 was provided by NFL.com. Information on conference membership was collected from the New York Times and information for matching hometown to counties was collected from the National Association of Counties. County location data was calculated from zip code location data provided by Gaslamp Media. A full list of all the players shown on the map can be found in this GitHub folder.