Where are UVA football players from?

A handy way of visualizing the hometowns of every player on every NCAA team is floating around, courtesy of Benn Stancil, chief analyst at Mode Analytics.

Benn's initial goal was to take a look at geographic diversity to study how it affects team performance.  He didn't find a correlation, and determined that the most diverse schools were ones you may expect, like Princeton, Harvard, Dartmouth, and Army.  (Notre Dame, at #5, is the only "BCS Conference" school in the top 10. Texas, at number 244, is the only such school in the bottom 10, with just 10 of the 121 players on their roster hailing from outside the state).

But we can take a look and see where today's Wahoos (or yesterday's, since this is data from ESPN's 2013 roster) are coming from.  Of the 108 players mapped, 62 are from the state of Virginia (57%).  Eighteen players come from that deep red spot of Chesterfield county (17%), though if you combine Newport News, Virginia Beach, and Norfolk, you come up with 23 players (21%).  Kicker R.C. Willenbrock travelled the farthest, coming from Denver, CO (though that will change next season when Upland, California's Jeffrey Farrar enrolls).

Below is a look at UVA's geographic footprint (click to enlarge).  The full interactive version is available to play with here.

Here's Virginia Tech's map.  We beat them in that Newport News - Virginia Beach - Norfolk corridor 23 players to 14, though they logically have more of a grasp on the SW part of the state.

You can see Notre Dame's impressive geographic diversity - they're all over the place

The entire ACC - Wake County, NC has the most ACCers with 50 (24 of them attending NC State).  South Florida is pretty talent-rich also.

Finally, here are all D-I players.  Note that this is done on a straight "count" basis.  You can change the map so the shading is based on D-I college football players per capita.  This puts the deep South ahead of areas like Southern California and New York...but also gives us some wacky results in less populated areas (ex. 3 out of 77 college aged males in Granite County, MT, making it look EXTREMELY football-rich).