I wanted to see if there were any geographical trends in where the current NFL starting QBs come from, and it turns out, there are strong trends:
I’m basing this off of where they grew up and played high school football, to the best of my ability.
They are overwhelmingly either from Texas, California, or Georgia. A full 15 out of 32 come from just those three states.
It’s interesting that there are very few QBs in the NFL the midwest, the central US/Great Plains, and basically none from the Northeast, the West/Northwest and the Southwest.
There are more NFL QBs from Hawaii (2) than there are from the following states COMBINED:
- Arizona
- New Mexico
- Oklahoma
- Kansas
- Nebraska
- South Dakota
- Montana
- Idaho
- Iowa
- Illinois
- Indiana
- Kentucky
- Tennessee
- Washington
- South Carolina
- New York
- Vermont
- New Hampshire
- Maine
- Alaska
- Connecticut
- Rhode Island
- Massachusetts
- Delaware
- New Jersey
- West Virginia
- Colorado
- Wyoming
- Nevada
- Wisconsin
- Maryland
- Mississipi
- Arkansas
None of those 33 states have current starting NFL QBs, Hawaii has two. Hawaii produces the most NFL QBs on a per capita basis–meaning adjusted for size of population. The population of Hawaii is only 1.42 million, and for it to have produced not one but two NFL starting QBs is highly unusual.
North Dakota is the least-populous state to have an NFL QB–760,000 people live there.
NFL QBs by state, 2022:
- Texas, 6: Patrick Mahomes, Matthew Stafford, Kyler Murray, Ryan Tannehill, Jalen Hurts and Baker Mayfield.
- California, 5: Tom Brady, Aaron Rodgers, Josh Allen, Derek Carr, Jared Goff. What’s weird about the California QBs is that none of them come from the Los Angeles area, which is what you’d expect as that’s the football hot-bed in the state.
- Georgia, 4: DeShaun Watson, Trevor Lawrence, Justin Fields, Davis Mills.
- Florida, 2: Lamar Jackson, Mac Jones
- Hawaii, 2: Tua Tagovailoa, Marcus Mariota
- Ohio, 2: Joe Burrow, Mitch Trubisky
- Pennsylvania, 1: Matt Ryan
- Alabama, 1: Jameis Winston
- Michigan, 1: Kirk Cousins
- Utah, 1: Zach Wilson
- Louisiana, 1: Dak Prescott
- Missouri, 1: Drew Lock
- Virginia, 1: Russell Wilson
- North Carolina, 1: Daniel Jones
- Oregon, 1: Justin Herbert
- North Dakota, 1: Carson Wentz
- Minnesota, 1: Trey Lance
I am not sure if there’s any real takeaway from this or if it’s mostly based off of random chance, but it is a pretty well-known fact that Texas, California and Georgia are some of the best states for football recruiting. So it should be pretty obvious that a lot of NFL QBs come from those states–a lot of NFL players in general come from those states.
The fact that Florida, which is a football factory of a state, only has 2 current NFL starting QBs, is, I think, a product of random chance rather than anything about the state of Florida specifically.
Fade the Public 