The NFL Draft was in late April, and six players who played high school football in the state of Virginia were selected. That didn’t seem like a lot to me, so I decided to run the numbers for the last five NFL Drafts.

A total of 42 players from the Commonwealth have been selected since the 2018 NFL Draft. I’ll list them all below, where they went to college and which city/county they are from. After the listings, we’ll see talk about what the data tells us.

For research for this article, I used MaxPreps for the 2019-22 draft classes and this article for the 2018 draft. The players are listed in the order they were drafted.

2022 (6)

LB Brandon Smith, Penn State, Louisa County
P Jordan Stout, Penn State, Russell County
TE James Mitchell, Virginia Tech, Wise County
OT Luke Tenuta, Virginia Tech, Albemarle County
DT Curtis Brooks, Cincinnati, Danville
CB Nazeeh Johnson, Marshall, Winchester*

...