Data source: 247sports.com (collegefootballdata.com API)
Database & Data Viz Tool: Formulabot.com/football-recruits
The database contains high school football recruiting data from 247sports.com, covering 61,000+ players with details on rankings, schools, commitments, positions, ratings, and geographic information from 2005 – 2025. It's been combined with NFL draft results to determine if the player was drafted.
This chart shows every P5 college team's NFL draft rate and the average player rating based on the players that first committed to their school.
Teams above the line do a better job at getting players to the NFL, relative to the caliber of players that commit there. Teams below the line are not getting players drafted at the rate at which they should be.
Side note: It's filtered for P5, so I technically forgot to include ND.
by No-Comfortable-9418
22 Comments
I am drawing a blank, what’s OM?
Iowa being way above the line is not surprising. They seem to always develop great players without stellar recruiting classes.
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The most surprising thing I noticed was Oregon “underperforming.” They’ve been a recruiting powerhouse for a while and one of the more successful CFB teams, I’d have thought that would translate to more draft picks.
Every other team I saw more or less lined up with my preconceived expectations.
Preparing players for the NFL is not the same as getting players drafted
Teams where nobody with a lower recruit ranking has a higher draft success rate.
* ALA
* UGA
* LSU
* FLA
* CLEM
* PSU
* IOWA
* NCST
* ILL
* UTAH
* ORST
* WAKE
* UCF
* HOU
* SMU
Teams where nobody with a higher recruit ranking has a lower draft success rate.
* USC
* TEX
* TAMU
* TENN
* UNC
* NEB
* ASU
* TTU
* UVA
* ARIZ
* COL
* WSU
OSU*
*Unless you’re a quarterback.
So all the best high school players go to the same powerhouses and they are the ones getting drafted?
I’m speechless.
How is Notre Dame not on here?
Shedeur’s slide really dragging down Colorado
Notre Dame literally has the most NFL drafted players of all time
I think it might be interesting if you had a series of graphs where you separate out the player rankings. For example, a graph of NFL draft rate for 5 star recruits only at each school, 4 star recruits only, etc. Might see some additional trends that you can’t tell from just taking an average player rating.
Where TF is Notre dame? They got some studs in the NFL
Using average commit ranking doesn’t seem like it would hold up in the transfer portal era. There’s too much turnover after 3-4 years.
Uggg….hate to see WSU at the bottom and I don’t think the situation is changing anytime soon. Go Cougs!!!
Now normalize for recruiting star rating
I wonder how much USC would fall if this were just the post-Carroll years
98% failure rate and yet the popularity of college football indicates that college football could- no- should indeed be pro if only there wasn’t the monopoly protections for the NFL to keep them from succeeding.
“Which teams are best at preparing players *for the nfl draft*” is a more accurate description. If you want a measure of how prepared they were to be pro football players, you need to do a longitudinal study and look at performance in the NFL as well.
Nice plot. But… is there a legend that explains the coloring of each school. I am assuming each color represents a single conference. Though with teams jumping conferences, it’s had to correlate a school’s performance here if their students made it to the NFL under one conference while the school switches to a different one.
I’m guessing Michigan State is the small little part of green you can see peaking out behind Oklahoma State?
Wish Notre Dame had been added to this list