I tier them. Presented without order:
T1 is obviously Cali, Texas, Florida, and now Georgia.
T2 is NC, SC, Ohio, Indiana, Louisiana, Alabama and then I think there's some states like Tennessee and Arizona that flirt with this level.
T3 is Virginia, Maryland, Arkansas, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Mississippi, Utah, Michigan, maybe one or two more I can't remember.
So you're talking 20-23 states or so. T3 is the most volatile of the states that are above-average or better at football. I think Virginia is way down this year, I think 15 is probably too high on second thought but I haven't really sat down and looked at the entirety of the rest of T3 to see how they're doing either. Sometimes Virginia can be the very best of T3.
Mind you, Virginia has the talent of a T2 state almost every year. There's talent crawling out of the wood in these programs but Virginia schools simply do not challenge themselves on the national stage so they will continue to bump their head on that glass ceiling of respect when it comes to how everyone views them. There are plenty of schools in T2 at least who are a reasonable distance away and with very few exceptions Virginia outright refuses to schedule them and even more rare is scheduling the cream of the crop in those states when the scheduling actually does happen.
