Rutgers Recruiting and the "State of Rutgers": a second look

When we opened our look at the early recruiting efforts of both Greg Schiano and Kyle Flood, it generated the following comment:

And I said, why not.

The first story indicated that in his first four years, Schiano focused heavily on recruiting the "State of Rutgers", an area that he (and we here) defined pretty much as New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, DC, and Florida.  Under that parameter, Schiano's first classes looked like this:

If you extend that to include the rest of his classes, through the 2011 recruit, those three non-Rutgers states change and the numbers look like this:

There were five more states from which he recruited players after his initial four years. The biggest addition to the recruiting footprint was Virginia, with three of those players entering with the class of 2011.  In fact, six of the seven Virginians were from 2008, 2009, and '11.

The premise the other day was that Schiano, for whatever reason, tended to focus more on the State of Rutgers.  If you move ahead to Flood's recruiting, he has stated that he would continue to focus on the State of Rutgers.  And he has, while adding a few more locales.  The question from the other day was, is Flood's extended reach a factor of being in the Big Ten and the program being more known outside the "State"?  Let's look at the overall recruiting pattern since 2001:

During his 11 years, Schiano recruited from outside the "State" just 16 times.  I discount the Missouri recruit, since that was the son of OC Bill Cubit.  As a true freshman, Ryan Cubit was given the reins of the offense with disastrous results, one of Schiano's on-the-job learning errors.  And the Iowa player was a juco transfer, Dallas Hendrickson, who never played a down for RU.  So maybe he really only had 14 recruits.

But in his four classes (2015 pending), Flood has gone outside the footprint and also reached south into Virginia.  Much has been made here and over on Testudo Times about the rich DMV (Delaware, Maryland, Virginia) area.  And if you look at the athletes we've recruited from the "State", which includes much of the DMV, and now add Virginia, we have a pretty rich recruiting area.

Will the "State of Rutgers" still, and always, be our bread and butter?  Will/can we go beyond that footprint and be successful in bringing in quality athletes?  February 4 is just two weeks away.