Breakdown of NFL Players from Utah

There have been 150 players who attended a Utah high school that have played in the NFL. I decided to look at where every recruit played high school and college football. I also pulled their star rating if available from 247Sports (rankings for players from the state of Utah date back to the 2002 class). First, let’s take a look at the full list.

Utah high school players that played in the NFL attended 26 different colleges. Local schools claimed the top four spots. Those were the Utah Utes (44), BYU Cougars (40), Utah State Aggies (29), and Weber State Wildcats (9). The Stanford Cardinal (5) had the most players for a school outside of the Beehive State. My biggest takeaway from these results is that despite BYU’s dominance in the 1980s, Utah still has produced more NFL players. Another interesting stat is that players who went to Utah had a longer average NFL career (3.7 years) compared to BYU (2.5 years) or Utah State (3.1 years). One conclusion that many may draw from these data is that staying home will better prepare a player for the NFL than leaving the state. This however is not a conclusion we can draw from these numbers. The reason is the local schools recruit the state of Utah far more heavily than schools from outside the state. To determine which school best prepares a player for the NFL, we would need the rate that a school produces NFL players from Utah, meaning we would need to take the number of NFL players from Utah divided by the total number of players from Utah who attended that school. Getting the total number of players from Utah who attended a school is beyond the scope of this article and would require digging through about 100 years of football records for 26 schools.

While this is a nice reference to see all of the players that made the NFL from Utah, it is skews the rankings due to players that played many years ago. Let’s now break down the data from players that entered the NFL in 2000 or later. This will cover all the players in the recruiting era and a few that predated recruiting rankings.

We can see that again Utah leads the way with NFL players with 17, followed by BYU (14), Utah State (9), and Weber State (4). For the same reason mentioned above, this does not mean that the local schools are better at putting local players into the NFL. We would again need to look at the rate to draw that conclusion. Most out-of-state schools have only brought in a handful of players from the Beehive State, rather than the hundreds that have attended an in-state school.

Because 2002 was the first class to feature recruiting ranking for the state of Utah, the 2006 NFL Draft is the first draft class where a player has the potential to have a recruiting ranking (John Madsen predated high school rankings). If we look at players that had the potential to have a recruiting ranking, we see that 32/43 were at least a 2-star recruit or higher (the other 11 who did not have a recruiting ranking were presumably 0 or 1 star recruits). Below is a breakdown of 43 NFL players by recruiting ranking in the recruiting era.

Stars do not matter! I am sure seeing this breakdown, that is your first thought given that 24/32 were 2- or 3-star recruits. Only one was a 5-star recruit, and only seven were 4-star recruits. Well, again this is where the rate comes in. The state of Utah has only produced two 5-star recruits since 2002: Haloti Ngata (2002) and Osa Masina (2016). Ngata made the NFL and Masina played as a true freshman at USC before legal trouble ended his college career. While the sample size is incredibly limited, 5-star recruits have a 50% chance to make the NFL from Utah. There have been only 23 4-star recruits to leave college prior to the 2018 season, so almost one-third of four-star recruits made the NFL (7/23). The number of 2- and 3-star recruits totals well over 100 for the same period (I do not have the exact number), meaning the chances of a 2- or 3-star recruit making the NFL is less than 5%.

I just threw a lot of numbers at you. If you are still reading by this point, your head might be spinning a little, so let’s put these numbers into context. The important takeaway for Utah fans is that Utah is better at putting players into the NFL than BYU or Utah State. Utah has put more local players in the NFL than any other school. As I stated, part of that is due to the larger number of local players that attend Utah compared to out-of-state schools. It is interesting to see that all other Pac-12 teams combined only put 10 Utah players in the NFL combined, with the Arizona State Sun Devils, Oregon Ducks, and Stanford Cardinal tied for the most with two apiece. The USC Trojans are likely to join this group with Porter Gustin likely to get drafted in the 2019 NFL Draft, the UCLA Bruins could also join the group with Andre James, and Stanford has the chance to take the lead if Brandon Fanaika makes the NFL. The state of Utah has produced 152 NFL players dating back to 1923, and there will certainly be many more with all of the talented players that the state of Utah produces every year.