One of the most popular questions we get is, “What is the best pipeline for CFB 26?”
That seemingly simple question is much more complicated than it seems. We can’t give you a definitive answer, but we can give you some information to help you come to your own conclusion.
Here’s why it’s complicated…
One of the hardest things to figure out is what does “best” mean? Which pipelines produce the most 5 star recruits? Which pipelines produce the most recruits at important positions?
Then we have to consider how some pipelines might have a ton of elite recruits in it but also a bunch of schools that have level 5 or level 4 pipelines in that region (meaning significantly more competition for recruits).
You can see why this is all incredibly complicated.
Note: View every CFB 26 team’s pipeline and tier level here.
We have to start somewhere so for our first data dump, we simply gathered pipeline data for every 5 star recruit in 10 different classes. Each class has 32 5-star recruits meaning that we gathered data on 320 recruits.
Here’s what we found:
Far and away the pipeline with the most 5 star recruits was Metro Atlanta and it wasn’t particularly close. In our testing over 9% of all 5 star recruits (29 out of 320) came from Metro Atlanta.
I’ll show the the numbers below and then talk about which pipelines seemed to over/under perform my own expectations.
Here’s the full data:
- Metro Atlanta (29)
- East Texas (22)
- North Texas (21)
- Central Florida (18)
- Big Apple (16)
- Northern California (16)
- Alabama (15)
- Louisiana (13)
- South Georgia (13)
- Tidewater (13)
- Ohio (12)
- North Carolina (11)
- Tennessee (11)
- South Carolina (10)
- Pennsylvania (9)
- South Florida (9)
- Southern California (9)
- Southwest Texas (9)
- Illinois (7)
- Michigan (6)
- North Florida (6)
- New England (5)
- Utah (5)
- Oklahoma (4)
- Arizona (3)
- Indiana (3)
- Kentucky (3)
- Mississippi (3)
- Missouri (3)
- Nevada (3)
- Colorado (2)
- Iowa (2)
- Kansas (2)
- Nebraska (2)
- Pacific Northwest (2)
- Arkansas (1)
- Hawaii (1)
- Minnesota (1)
- Big Sky (0)
- New Mexico 0)
- West Virginia (0)
- Wisconsin (0)
Interesting Takeaways
Big Apple (16), Alabama (15), and Louisiana (13) all surprised me and came in a lot stronger than I would have expected.
South Florida (9), Southern California (9), and Southwest Texas (9) surprised me by coming in significantly lighter than I expected. I thought all 3 of those were premium pipelines but the data in our tests suggest they aren’t nearly as strong as I thought.
Next Up: View all of our CFB 26 Dynasty Tools
Limitations
10 recruiting classes isn’t really that significant of a sample size so take this data for what it is: Somewhat interesting and helpful, but far from conclusive.
This data also is limited to exclusively 5 star recruits. There is a lot more that goes into a pipeline’s strength than simply total number of 5 stars recruits.
For those interested, you can download the full Excel data for this test here.
We’ll have more tests coming on pipelines! Let us know your takeaways or what you want us to test next in the comments below!
