When you talk about recruiting in the world of college football, the SEC obviously comes to mind first. Over the years, they’ve stacked the top talent in the world, year after year, and produced some of the best NFL players in the history of the sport.
The Pac-12 isn’t too far behind, though. When going through the top recruits that each team has signed in their history, some of the most notable names in the game have come from Pac-12 schools, whether it be John Elway, Dan Fouts, Aaron Rodgers, Keenan Allen, Robert Woods, Shaq Thompson or Kayvon Thibodeaux.
We wanted to dive into the archives and see who the greatest recruits in Pac-12 history were. At the start of this research project, we initially combed through the top recruits that every team had signed and tried to put them in order. Unfortunately, it quickly became clear that the USC Trojans were going to break the game. While most schools had a handful or a dozen of five-star players to account for in the history of their programs, the Trojans had over 60 signed to play in LA over their history.
If we did the top 50 recruits of all time in the Pac-12, it would end up being a list of 45 USC players, and maybe five other players from Oregon, UCLA or Cal. Nobody wants to read that list, save for our friends at Trojans Wire.
So to make it a bit more appealing, we restricted the window to the past decade and change, looking to 2010 for our start date. Parsing the top-rated players since then, we get a nice list of guys who have come through the Conference of Champions, painting a clear picture of which schools have best dominated the recruiting space out west in the latest era of college football.
Here are the top 50 Pac-12 recruits of the past decade.