Some of you may have seen a link from EDSBS to the posts on Bears Necessity about putting this year's recruiting on a map to see how the regional powers of the Pac 10 do in recruiting in their own back yard.
This got me to thinking about where SC is recruiting most heavily. We hear a lot about the out-of-state recruits like Nick Perry, but experience - as well as a quick look at the 07 roster - suggests that the majority of recruits are coming from southern California.
I've started mapping the last several classes - 2006 2005 through 2008 - and the results can be found here:
The 2008 class is marked by blue icons, 2007 by red icons, and 2006 by green icons. Update [2008-2-17 14:39:33 by DC Trojan]: 2005 recruits have now been added in a particularly fetching turquoise. Transfers to USC are marked with a little airplane icon that tracks to their high school; those icons are not color-coded to a year. I haven't excluded players who have subsequently left USC and transferred elsewhere.
This is a bit of a work in progress; I wasn't willing to go to the level of building an XML reference file and teaching myself enough javascript to create a data-driven mashup, so it's not a very sophisticated presentation. I'm going to focus on adding more classes as I can get hold of the information; hopefully at some point in the future I'll be able to work up some way to slice and dice the data a bit more.
Any suggestions welcomed.