Methodology

The two axes

Every team-season is scored on two independent measures. Local-developed core is the share of the roster that both grew up nearby and has never played anywhere else — the "grown at home" players. Transfer stock is the share of the roster with a detected prior team, regardless of where they grew up. A roster can be high on both (deep local roots, still active in the portal), low on both, or anywhere between — that's the point of tracking them separately rather than collapsing everything into one "is this team local" number.

The three lenses

"Local" needs a boundary, and there's no single correct one, so the site computes every composition metric under three definitions of local:

• In-state — the player's home state matches the program's state.
• 250 miles — the player's hometown is within 250 miles of campus.
• 100 miles — the player's hometown is within 100 miles of campus.

The front-page national trend uses a fourth, combined home-region definition: a player is local when his listed home state matches the school or his listed hometown is within 250 straight-line miles of campus. It is a union, so a player who meets both tests is counted once. This keeps a nearby player across a state line and a same-state player in a large state from being treated as outsiders.

Team pages, rankings, and the quadrant map default to the in-state lens. That's a deliberate choice for comparability, not a claim that state lines are the truest definition of "local" — a player from just across a state border is arguably more local to campus than one from the far side of their own state. In-state is simply the lens every team can be measured on the same way, with no campus-specific radius to calibrate. For a sense of how the boundary choice matters in practice: the median FBS team's Homecoming Radius during the 2021–2025 portal era is 250.6 miles — almost exactly the 250-mile lens boundary, which is a useful gut check on why in-state and 250-mile shares can diverge for teams near the median.

The long national trend

The front-page line is a purely geographic measure. Transfer history is not comparable across the older official archives, so it is not part of this chart. A player counts as local when his listed home state matches the school or his listed hometown is within 250 straight-line miles of campus. A player who meets both tests counts once.

First, the site calculates a local share for every qualifying team-season. Then it takes the median of those team shares for the season. It does not pool players nationally, so a school that lists a larger roster cannot outweigh another school. The annual cohort is allowed to change as coverage grows. The underlying series begins in 1979, the first season with at least 10 qualifying teams. The front page currently displays 1986 onward.

A team-season qualifies only when it has at least 70 roster rows, a known home state for at least 75% of the roster, and enough information to classify at least 75% of the roster under the combined state-or-250-mile definition. The team local share uses classified players as its denominator.

Sources are selected for a whole team-season. A reliable CFBD roster is used first. If CFBD is missing or fails a reliability gate, a reliable official athletic-site roster is used instead. Otherwise the team-season is omitted. CFBD and official rows are never blended within one team-season. This fallback is especially important from 2004 through 2008, when some CFBD roster listings are incomplete.

Homecoming Radius

The Homecoming Radius is the median distance between a team's roster hometowns and its campus, in miles — the radius of a circle that would contain half the located players. It sidesteps the lens problem entirely: no in-state/250-mile/100-mile boundary to pick, no state-size distortion, and it's directly comparable across every program regardless of how large or oddly shaped their home state is. A shrinking radius means the roster is drawing from closer to home; a growing one means it's reaching further afield. Team pages show it season by season; the rankings boards surface the tightest and widest radii across all of FBS, plus a "500-Mile Club" of programs whose median player grew up 500 or more miles from campus.

Detected transfer stock is a lower bound

A player counts as detected transfer stock when the same athlete ID shows up on another team's roster in an earlier season. That catches most transfers, but it's structurally a lower bound, not a census: it can miss players whose prior stop was a JUCO or an FCS/lower-division program outside the source archive, players whose earlier-season roster listing is itself missing, and the occasional duplicated or reissued athlete ID. It's reliable for comparing programs and tracking a team's trend over time; treat the exact percentage for any one season as an estimate, not a ledger.

Deep history is geography first

For 134 programs, official athletic-site archives extend the hometown record before CollegeFootballData's 2004 floor. Coverage is uneven by design: LSU is reliable back to 1981, while several programs reach the 1960s or earlier and others do not clear the reliability bar until much later. Team pages show each program's actual span instead of pretending every school has the same history.

Those archive rows have no stable cross-school athlete ID, so they do not receive a detected-transfer value or a local-developed classification. When an official roster has a genuine, sparsely populated “previous school” field, the site labels its share as a previous-school proxy. It remains separate from detected transfer stock everywhere. In overlapping seasons, CollegeFootballData remains canonical; archive rows fill earlier or otherwise missing team-seasons.

Which seasons count

Early-era roster archives are thinner and less complete than recent ones, so a team-season is only treated as reliable — and only shown in headline stats and rankings — when it has at least 70 roster rows and a known home state for at least 75% of them. In the current build, 136 of 140 programs clear that bar by 2016; each team page notes its own first reliable season.

The front-page historical line adds the 75% combined-classification gate described above. That extra test is chart-specific because the line uses the state-or-radius union rather than any single team-page lens.

Rankings boards rank each team on its most recent completed season (2025), with change arrows measured against a 2016–2018 baseline average — the earliest window where every program's data is trustworthy on the same terms, and conveniently the last stretch before the transfer portal opened in October 2018. The dataset also includes 2026 rosters. Rankings use the 2026 roster data shown throughout the site, while change arrows compare it with the 2016–2018 baseline.

The four quadrants

Plotting local-developed core against transfer stock splits every team into one of four quadrants:Homegrown (high local core, low transfer stock), National base (low local core, low transfer stock), Local reload (high local core, high transfer stock), and Free Agency (low local core, high transfer stock). The boundaries are 35% local-developed core and 15% transfer stock — round numbers chosen near the actual portal-era FBS medians of 34.0% and 15.8%, so roughly half of FBS sits on each side of each line. A value exactly on a boundary is counted on the high side. These are round-number splits for a readable map, not claims about a "correct" threshold for what counts as home-grown or portal-heavy.

The homepage comparison begins in 2009, the first season with a national cohort that can be plotted on both axes. A team-season appears in the matrix only when it passes the roster reliability gates and has comparable local-developed and transfer-stock values. Reliable older official rosters without comparable prior-team history remain part of the geographic trend, but are not placed on this matrix.

Data sources

The 2004-forward roster and transfer series is built from CollegeFootballData.com, an independent, actively maintained college football data project. Earlier hometown history comes from official school athletic-site roster archives for 134 programs, with exact source URLs retained per player-season and hometowns geocoded against the U.S. Census Bureau place gazetteer.

This site expands on the original analysis in Andrew Dunn's essay, "How local is your team, really?", which covered a 25-program cohort using the public SportsDataverse ESPN roster archive and 247Sports recruiting pages. Credit to both SportsDataverse and 247Sports for the data behind that original published research. This site's 140-program build uses CFBD as the canonical modern source and official archives to extend each team's history where the source passes the reliability rules above.

Walk-ons are included

Roster composition here counts the full listed roster — scholarship players and walk-ons alike — with no weighting by playing time, starts, or recruiting rank. Walk-on rates vary by program, and walk-ons skew more local on average, so two teams with identical scholarship-only rosters can show different local-developed shares here if their walk-on programs differ in size. That's a real signal (who a program brings into the building at all), just not the same signal as "who plays."

Why the numbers here differ slightly from the essay

CollegeFootballData's roster snapshots run about 9% deeper on average than the SportsDataverse ESPN archive the original essay used — validated across the 25-program cohort's 2016–2025 seasons, CFBD rosters average roughly 1.09x as many rows. Extra rows are disproportionately walk-ons, who tend to be local, so this site's in-state shares typically read a point or two higher than the essay's for the same team and season (and, in the mirror image, transfer-stock shares read a point or two lower, since the extra non-transfer rows dilute the share). Cohort-wide, the net bias is small — about +0.3 percentage points on home-state share and −0.9 points on transfer stock, averaged across 250 matched team-seasons — and every headline claim from the original essay re-derives cleanly from this pipeline. But if you're comparing a specific number here against the essay directly, expect it to be off by a point or two, and know why.

Other limits

• "Local" is based on a player's listed hometown, not birthplace or where they actually grew up.
• State borders aren't equally meaningful — a small, densely-populated state and a large, sparsely-populated one don't offer the same pool of in-state talent.
• This measures roster composition, not competitive outcomes. A rising or falling local share says nothing on its own about whether a team is getting better or worse.