We’ve spent the last two articles talking about how in-state recruiting in Virginia has been different ever since the 2006 recruiting class.  Today we’ll compare Virginia with two similar states: South Carolina and Pennsylvania.

We chose those two states because they both have two Power Five conference football teams in their borders, just like the state of Virginia.  South Carolina has a similar number of Division I recruits as Virginia, so as we did with the Commonwealth, we took a look at how Clemson and South Carolina did among the state’s top 15 recruits.  Pennsylvania is slightly bigger in terms of prospects, so we took that state’s top 20 prospects and connected them with Penn State and Pitt.

North Carolina wasn’t included because that state has four ACC teams (and ECU), and recruits from that state have a history of going elsewhere, anyway.  We also considered Georgia, but ultimately decided against using that state.  It produces many more recruits than Virginia and Pennsylvania, so it wouldn’t be a fair comparison.

In past articles, we talked about Virginia from 1998 through 2005, and from 2007 through 2014.  We used the Roanoke Times rankings pre-2003.  Since there are no Roanoke Times rankings for South Carolina and Pennsylvania before 2003, we have to adopt a slightly different method when comparing Virginia to those two states.  We’ll simply use the Rivals.com in-state rankings for all three states from 2003 through 2014.

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