re: Per capita, Louisiana is producing the most NFL skill/speed talent, and by a large margin

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What? If anything,the numbers provided show the lower participation rates prove the quality of players compared to AL and MS. It also proves my point about Florida and it's very low participation rate compared to the other states mentioned.You certainly can't blame the economy for their low rates.


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So the ratio of Kids in NFL to participation rates will be skewed downward due to excess kids playing who likely will not only ever play college ball, but never hit the field for the HS team except in the 4th QTR when the game is at hand and they can run down the field on special teams


No idea of what kind of point you're trying to make here with nothing more this anecdotal evidence.Texas is obviously a huge state with huge high schools but Alabama is about the size of LA and has a much higher participation rate than LA as does Mississippi (which is a smaller state) and it also shows odds of making it to the NFL are higher in LA than those two other states.

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And that is my point, scaling by population addresses the concerns of "Self selection" with respect to why some states have more kids playing than others. Those factors include among other things economic/finances of the local school district (some school districts can support more participation and field larger teams), economics of the family, how much the local community values football. So in some towns in the SEC footprint, football is as much of the local town culture as God, Family and Country, etc.

So lets use a within state comparison to keep it simple. A local team in county/parish A has a team normally of 80 players and produces 8 players a year that go on to lets say College ball. The HS in the next Country/Parish over has 120 players a year that play varsity ball. They would have the same 8 players a year that go on to college ball that the team A does. Those incremental/additional 40 players result in an additional 2 more players that go on to college ball.

So team A has 8 a year that go to college out of 80, rate of 10%

So team B has 10 that go to college out of 120, and 8.3% rate.

So participation rates make Team B look worse than Team A. Can we deduce from those statistics that Team B's coaching staff did a better job of developing HS talent in order to get a college football Scholarship? No, because at some point those additional kids playing football are not going to be able to play College ball. There football talent level caps out at HS.

If you take the population of the State, which is the same denominator across all teams, Team B looks better.

So lets take that same analysis and apply it across States. The Population is a fixed measurement for a state and is not subject to the "self-selection" issues that relate to the participation rate measurement used as the scaler.

So regardless of participation rates and all the other exogeneous factors that impact participation rates that we can't accurately measure and control for, using Population as the scaler does not have the issues.

So when you compare the 59 LA HS players on NFL rosters starting the 2020 NFL season vs. the 60 from Alabama and PA, etc, using population as the scaler does not have issues related to using participation rates.

However, using participation rates addresses the concerns you raised that states like Florida have a large segment of their total population that are retirees from other states and their grandkids are likely living in other states so that impacts Florida's per capita measurement, etc. So using participation rates can give you relevant information as well.


So I think both measurements provide relevant information. Cheers.