Oregon Ducks Football B1G West Coast Blue Chip Dependence

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At the time of writing 93% of On3’s Blue Chip High School Football Prospects are committed for the 2027 high school recruiting cycle. As the college football calendar has grown more and more busy in December and January coaches and player personnel staffs have accelerated high school recruiting with most high school classes more or less being finished by early July. The advantage for players is that they can play their senior year of high school without the distractions that come with recruiting and they can agree to terms on NIL deals well in advance of signing day. As a result the period of February to July is when the majority of high school recruiting for the following year’s cycle is completed before these players senior year of high school.

And it was this past spring that USC fans (and the actual athletic department) were taking social media victory laps after landing some highly touted southern California prospects that Oregon was also recruiting. In the past two high school recruiting cycles USC has placed a ton of emphasis on recruiting southern California and their fans have been eager to rub that recruiting success in the faces of Duck fans.

While USC getting it’s high school recruiting act together absolutely creates a problem for Oregon my suspicion was two-fold.

1. This isn’t a unique problem for Oregon. It’s a problem for every program that recruits California, which in 2027 is nearly every major program
2. Of all the West-Coast teams Oregon is likely the most well equipped to continue to recruit well as Oregon is the West-Coast team that best recruits nationally

I wanted to see if there was data that backed up my suspicion so what I did is looked at every recruiting class for the 4 West-Coast B1G teams since 2017. I used 2017 as this was the first class after Mark Helfrich’s firing and was the year Oregon recruiting notably began trending upward. I wanted to see what was the California makeup of Oregon’s best classes.

Going back to 2017 and including 2027 with an Asterix as most classes are mostly complete but not finalized yet gave me 11 years of data to work with.

First off here is the inverse national power 5/4 recruiting ranking for all 4 B1G west-coast schools since 2017. I used the inverse so that the better class is higher.

Overall Recruiting Rankings

Over the last 9 years Oregon has recruited at the highest level of all the west-coast B1G schools. Here is a relevant note on each team:

• Oregon is the only one of the 4 that had a Top 20 class each year since 2017
• USC has been the only team to have a higher ranked class than Oregon, doing so 4 of the 11 years
• Washington was most competitive with Oregon in recruiting under Chris Peterson but Jedd Fish has turned around Husky high school recruiting notably
• This graph visually shows Chip Kelly’s disdain for recruiting at UCLA

California Blue-Chip Ratio

Next what I wanted to try and discern was how much each of these schools relied on California when they had a strong recruiting class. For each teams Top 20 recruiting class I determined the California Blue Chip Ratio which simply is:

Number of Blue-Chips from California In Class / Total Number of Blue-Chips in Class

If a team didn’t have a Top 20 class then they were omitted from the Chart so USC for example goes from being on to off the chart in years they had a recruiting class outside the Top 20.

This isn’t a perfect measure because I’m not focusing on Southern California specifically. What I’ve learned interacting with west-coast college football fans online is that everyone somehow knows the various areas of Los Angeles no matter where on the west-coast you live as if LA is downtown West Coast. As a Mountain man North of the Border I have a weird amount of knowledge of downtown Canada A.K.A Toronto despite leaving 1000s of Miles/KMs away. Maybe one day I will subliminally obtain knowledge of the greater LA area but for now I digress.

Back under Willie Taggart and the early Cristobal classes Oregon more heavily relied upon California as the 2017 to 2019 classes where the only 3 in the last 11 years where over 50% of Oregon’s blue chips came from California. Cristobal’s classes progressively had a lower and lower proportion of blue chips from California each year with the 2022 class being the low point until this year.

That 2022 class was really interesting to me as all 3 of Oregon’s west-coast rivals had a bad recruiting class that cycle. One would expect that with those results from the Ducks rivals Oregon would have cleaned up in California but instead that class had the 2nd lowest proportion of blue chips from California in the last 11 years.

I then used the same concept to look at progressively better and better classes. Here is the same chart but only including Top 15, Top 10, and Top 5 classes respectively.

As you can see once we get into the Top 15 and beyond this essentially becomes a Oregon vs USC comparison as Washington and UCLA have only had 3 combined Top 15 classes the past 11 years.

Each year USC had a Top 15 class they had a higher proportion of their blue chips come from California in comparison to Oregon, which makes sense given their location and history. To me the important takeaway here is that Oregon is still very capable of putting together strong recruiting classes when USC is recruiting strong in California. Every year in which USC scored a Top 10 high school recruiting class Oregon was also able to put together a Top 10 class. All 3 of those years Oregon had a lower California Blue-Chip Ratio then USC indicating to me that Oregon is more than happy to and capable of pivoting if necessary to other regions for high school talent.

Here is another way to visually represent that. I took the average California blue chip ratio whenever a west coast B1G team has a Top X recruiting class or better

Given the perceived goals for each of these programs on the field to me if I had to rank them and their necessity for recruiting well in California I would go

1. USC given the over 50% California Blue Chip Ratio when they have Top 10 and Top 5 classes
2. UCLA given the over 60% California Blue Chip Ratio when they have a Top 20 class
3. Washington given the over 40% California Blue Chip Ratio when they have a Top 20 and Top 15 class
4. Oregon given that the have the lowest California Blue Chip Ratio among these 4 teams across all qualities of classes

I want to be clear, USC recruiting well in California is a problem for Oregon. However I only think its a problem in the sense that any rival recruiting any area of the country is a problem for your team. Specific to USC in California though Oregon seems pretty well equipped to handle that problem and respond.

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