As top talent slowly leaks from SEC territory, the league looks to stop a three-year title slide

When thinking about bragging rights between conferences as the 2026 season rolls along - who has them, and who doesn’t -- the Big Ten’s three straight national titles during a stretch when the Southeastern Conference didn’t land a team in the championship game flies to the top of the list.

There are dozens of ways to explain that gulf between the nation’s two top conferences and even more ways to excuse it, with almost all the reasons embedded somewhere in the world of name, image, likeness payments that have turned college athletics upside down.

An Associated Press analysis of recruiting found one steady trend: The percentage of top high school recruits from states with SEC schools who stay home to play at one of those schools has dropped from 72% in 2022 – the first recruiting year after NIL rules as we know them were fully established – to a projected 53% for the still-developing 2027 signing class.

That translates to 99 players staying close to home in 2022 down to 78 for 2027. Big Ten schools picked up nine of those players in 2022, a number projected to rise to 22 next year.

This is not necessarily a Big Ten raid of five-star studs in the SEC's traditional recruiting hotbeds. But it does suggest a slow drain of talent that includes well-known players such as Heisman Trophy favorite Jeremiah Smith alongside young offensive and defensive linemen, running backs and quarterbacks who used to help programs build depth that is sorely lacking in a sport where the promise of immediate playing time can be as strong a recruiting tool as NIL payments.

“I think it’s moved that way over a 10-year trend," Georgia coach Kirby Smart said. "I can’t say that it’s more because of NIL. I think its more because social media, these kids travel, they play more 7-on-7's, they know more kids across the country. So that trend was trending that way before NIL — and NIL probably just sped it up even more.”

One noticeable result: Top SEC programs that once commanded attention simply by the power of their name or their coach are not hoarding depth-building talent, which helped vaulted the league to the top of the sport in all but four seasons from 2005-2022.

“NIL ... has changed the landscape of recruiting,” said Ohio State coach Ryan Day, who brought Smith in from Florida. “I also think the world’s just gotten smaller. For us, we never used to recruit down toward Alabama and Louisiana, Mississippi. Now, you’re seeing on our team, more and more guys from that area.”

The AP looked at the 24/7Sports Composite’s 250 highest-ranked recruits each year since 2015, then broke down how many of those players lived in states with SEC teams (the only new state in the mix from then to now is Oklahoma, where the Sooners joined the SEC in 2024 along with Texas). Then, among that smaller group, the AP determined how many went to schools currently in the SEC and how many went elsewhere.

To no one’s surprise, more than half of the top 250 players came from SEC states every year.

In 2024, Smith was top-ranked among the 153 recruits who hailed from those states and one of 54 from that subset who chose a school outside the SEC. Growing up, he said, “I always dreamed I’d go to Alabama” to follow so many receivers from South Florida – Amari Cooper, Jerry Jeudy, Calvin Ridley -- who had starred for Nick Saban in Tuscaloosa.

But Ohio State saw an early opening and pounced. That didn’t stop other suitors – a high school player’s lean toward a certain school never does -- but the calls from Alabama dried up.

“I think I committed to Ohio State too early and that’s why they stopped,” Smith said. “They thought there was no chance.”

Not all the players who left SEC states ended up in the Big Ten, which like many leagues boasts schools practically from coast to coast. In fact, a bigger chunk of those players went to Clemson, Florida State and Miami, three Atlantic Coast Conference teams situated in the region that won (Clemson) or been been in (FSU, Miami) the national-title conversation over the past quarter-century. Texas Tech currently has commitments from eight top-250 high school seniors from SEC states.

All of this has intensified the once-slow drip of talent away from the SEC and a change in the way recruiting is viewed across the South.

“It used to be a badge of honor for some kids, or most kids, just to be like, ‘I’m going to an SEC school,’” said Buford (Georgia) High coach Bryant Appling, whose school has produced about a half-dozen recent high-ranked recruits, including quarterback Dylan Raiola, who signed with Nebraska out of high school and is now at Oregon.

“But I think these conferences have become so national, with the Big Ten being everywhere now and not just in the” Midwest, Appling said. “They’re trying to put a footprint down south, with the SEC going out to Texas, getting further out west.”

In the days of an active transfer portal, a player’s first commitment isn’t necessarily his last. Yet on the ESPN list of this year’s 25 best players in college, only nine arrived at their current location via the transfer portal.

That did little to change the overall math. Of those 25 players, 11 hailed from SEC states. Of those 11:

— Six, including transfers Cam Coleman at Texas and Kewan Lacy at Ole Miss, attend an SEC school. That makes for a "retention" rate of 54.5% that fits with the overall trend.

— The other five all played in national title games over the last two years with Indiana, Miami, Notre Dame and Ohio State, a sign of the quality of the players — at least the top tier — who are signing elsewhere.

Greg Carswell, the head coach at Grayson High in Loganville, Georgia, says there is still such a thing as loyalty in his part of the world. He mentioned a three-star recruit, defensive lineman Waylon Wooten, who grew up a Georgia fan and “never wanted to be anything else but a Bulldog.”

“You’ve got those situations where it’s, ‘I don’t care what anyone else is offering, this is where I’m going,’” Carswell said.

In Carswell's eyes, those who do leave, though, usually do it for a simple reason.

“It comes down to making sure the financial package meets the athlete’s needs," he said. "Once that happens, I think a lot of kids are happy with going ahead and agreeing to terms. I think a lot of people lose out on kids because they can’t reach those terms.”

Money also frees up parents of top players to think differently about where their kid goes.

Coach Mike Locksley of Maryland — whose move to the Big Ten from the ACC in 2014 was part of a bigger trend of conferences building out their footprint — said where players used to think about staying within a three-hour radius of their hometown so parents could afford to see the games, the injection of NIL money has “made the runway a little longer for opportunities to recruit.”

It has allowed Locksley to tap into relationships he formed while coaching at Florida and Alabama. He has carried an average of around 18 players from SEC states on his roster since the start of NIL.

“Some of those areas -- like Tennessee, like Alabama, like Florida -- which have all been really good to us here these last couple of years, is a testament to the new landscape," Locksley said. “And also what the power of the Maryland brand has become playing in the Big Ten.”

AP sports writer Charles Odum contributed to this report.