Where college football rosters come from
About
Homecoming
College football teams represent places. Homecoming asks how closely their rosters still do.
The argument
A real part of the sport's identity has changed. The typical roster has become less tied to the place its program represents, while player movement has made program continuity more fluid.
That is a cultural claim, not a verdict that modern college football is better or worse. Some programs remain strongly local. Some have recruited nationally for decades. Some use the portal to bring players home. Homecoming puts those counterexamples beside the broad trend and lets fans decide what the change means to them.
What the site measures
The long national view calls a player local when the listed hometown is in the school's stateor within 250 straight-line miles of campus. Each season is the median among team rosters that pass the coverage rules. The qualifying group changes as historical archives become available; missing and unreliable seasons stay missing.
Team pages also keep three geography lenses separate: in-state, within 100 miles, and within 250 miles. Homecoming Radius is the median hometown-to-campus distance among players with known coordinates. It is a median, not an average and not a judgment about roster quality.
What the data cannot say
A player counts as detected transfer stock only when the same stable athlete ID appeared at another school in an earlier season. That makes the figure a lower bound, not a complete portal ledger. Older official-school archives do not provide comparable IDs, so those transfer values remain unknown instead of being shown as zero.
The site measures listed rosters, including walk-ons. It does not measure snaps, scholarships, wins, or whether roster change caused competitive results. The latest data covers 2026 rosters.
Read the full methodologyWhy it started
I started with LSU because I wanted to count a change I could feel: rooting for Louisiana no longer seemed quite as much like rooting for Louisianans.
Homecoming opens that question to 140 programs without assuming every school changed in the same way. The data comes from CollegeFootballData.com, official athletic-site roster archives, and U.S. Census place coordinates.
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