At this point, you’ve all seen the graphic that’s making rounds on the internet:
Everyone and their mothers are having a field day with it and dancing on the the grave while praying for Tide to actually wind up there.
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Now, to be frank, there’s very fair reasons for concern about Alabama’s recruiting class this year. They’ve only pulled in two top-100 recruits (both are elite, by the way), and two more top-300 recruits. The rest are three stars who are either developmental upside long shots or cheaper roster depth that previously would have been walk-ons before the changes to scholarship limits.
The word from around the program is that it’s somewhat intentional, with the staff looking at 2027 and the sheer amount of players expected back from the current roster and not wanting to spend big on players who won’t have a path to the field in 2027. Basically, Alabama is a very young roster that just had an elite recruiting class in back to back seasons with one of the lowest attrition rates in the NCAA right now, and the staff is therefore saving a finite money pool for (ostensibly) 2027 transfer portal additions and/or roster retention of breakout players.
It makes sense, though you (or I) could still argue with that and say that they should be putting more money into recruiting regardless, as more players will leave than you like, and recruiting “momentum” and perception is everything in a sport where you build your roster by convincing people to come (i.e. there’s no draft or salary cap).
You could argue me into believing either way.
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On the other hand, the masses might be right, and maybe recruits just don’t want to come to Bama anymore and it’s a harbinger of the end. And honestly, I won’t even argue against that either. I’m open to all possibilities here.
What I do want to do, though, is take a look at the idea that Alabama not recruiting in-state is some grave sin, even while the Tide has been raking in players from areas like California and Maryland in recent classes. I wanted to look at two concepts:
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Do in-state Alabama players bust less than those from other states?
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Are in-state Alabama players more loyal to UA?
And as a couple of cut off points, I want to use 2018 as the furthest back recruiting class due to that being the first year that college football’s offseason fell to pieces with the changing of the recruiting calendar. 2024 will be the most recent class, as 2025 was still too new last year. There’s still some “To be decided” players in the 2023 and 2024 classes (like Zay Mincey) who I will leave out of the numbers altogether. I also will only be considering top 250 prospects (using the 247 Sports Composite) for this exercise, as players ranked below that are often viewed more as depth for Alabama.
What constitutes as a bust? Well, that’s going to be subjective and you’ll just have to rely on my professional judgement, but in general, this is what I expect, with occasional exceptions:
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Top 10 – should have been a star. At minimum, a day 1 or day 2 draft pick.
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Top 40 – Should be a starter and a good one. NFL draft pick
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Top 100 – Should have started for Alabama and not been bad. NFL Draft pick
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Top 250 – Should have been at least a regular contributor, or ideally a starter. May have had a rocky career.
Without any further opining, let’s look at the cold, hard numbers.
From the years of 2018 to 2024, the Crimson Tide signed 30 total high school prospects from the state of Alabama who were ranked in the top 250 (again, excluding Zay Mincey, Kevin Riley, and Jeremiah Beaman from the 2024 class). In that span, 30% of those players lived up to their recruiting rankings, and 30% stayed with the Tide until either making it to the NFL, or at least 4 years.
By comparison, when recruiting from outside the state of Alabama, that hit rate went up to 41%, while the rate of players staying in Tuscaloosa through their career increased to 35%.
As far as a state by state breakdown (of states with at least 5 recruits signed), here are the rankings in terms of hit %. The sample size is in parentheses.
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Both of the Tide’s coaching staffs (Saban and DeBoer) have generally been very successful when targeting players from California and from the Baltimore/DMV area.
Interestingly, of the 2025 freshmen that we expect to play the biggest roles in 2026, three more are also highly rated players from California (Dijon Lee, Jackson Lloyd, and Kaleb Edwards), while Lotzeir Brooks is from New Jersey and Michael Carroll is from Florida.
In other words, if this staff targets someone from California, you’re very likely to come away happy with the player.
All of that is to say… Don’t worry too much that Alabama hasn’t locked down any of the top ten players in the state. It’s a fairly weak in-state class (no players in the top 90), but even more importantly, Alabama has generally had MORE success when recruiting out of state over the last 8 years.
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Now if you want to worry that the out of state recruiting also isn’t good enough right now… I won’t stop you. Worry away.
