As Atlanta metro area booms, so does football in Georgia
♦ The Peach State has become a clear No. 4 when it comes to producing major college football players.
The lawn in front of Milton High School looks big enough for a football field and provides a grand welcome mat to a building that would fit right in on the campus of a prestigious college, with its colonnade leading to an entrance of glass doors and tall windows.
The 14-year-old building is quiet and mostly dark on this Friday night in northern Fulton County, some 30 miles from downtown Atlanta. The action is at nearby Eagle Stadium, where thousands pack the bleachers to watch their defending state champions face perennial power Buford High.
Milton is an old school, it turns 100 next year, but a new football power. Last year’s title was the Eagles’ first, another source of pride for a small city — incorporated in 2006 — that is one of the wealthiest in the state. Milton coach Adam Clack has lived through the growth of north-central Georgia over the last two decades. It is startling.
“This was horse farms,” Clack said.
The population of the Atlanta metropolitan area has boomed, adding 663,000 residents since 2010 to make it the fourth-fastest growing in the United States. The surge has created vibrant, even affluent suburbs and exurbs, such as Milton.
It also has boosted the quality and depth of high school football
in a state where both were already among the best in the country. Many public schools are running well-resourced programs that lure top coaches from neighboring states with big salaries and prepare players for the next level with operations that mimic elite colleges.
Georgia has become the clear No. 4 state behind Texas, Florida and California when it comes to producing football players for major college programs. Recruiters from all over the country flock to Atlanta to find talent, but many of these players are staying close to
home and stocking the rosters of the nearby Southeastern Conference and Atlantic Coast Conference schools.
“I ask candidly to a lot of college coaches: You got one place you can go and you can only spend one day, where are you going?” Clack said. “They’re like: ‘No doubt, we’re going to the metro Atlanta area. It’s not because you necessarily have the most talent. It’s because you have the most ready talent that’s going to be eligible.’”
Ten years ago, 6.1% of all players on FBS rosters hailed from Georgia, according to NCAA
data, just a touch more than Ohio (5.9). That rose to 7.2% of FBS players from Georgia in 2013. Ohio was still at 5.9%.
Last year, 8.2% of FBS players listed Georgia as their home state, creeping closer to California (10.5) at No. 3.
The high-end talent is also on the rise. Using 247 Sports’ composite rankings of recruits, the number of bluechip recruits (rated four- or five-star) from Georgia per year from 2002-09 was 17.3. From 2010-2020, Georgia is averaging 30.8 blue chips per year, an increase of 78%.