ATLANTA — Georgia native Anthonie Knapp knew Notre Dame was in Indiana when the offensive lineman decided to take a recruiting visit. Exactly where in Indiana?
“I didn’t know, like, closest cities?” said the freshman offensive tackle from Roswell, Ga., who grew up a Bulldogs fan.
That’s better than his teammate Jaylen Sneed, who grew up in South Carolina. “I literally asked (head coach Marcus) Freeman on the first call, where even is Notre Dame? And he was like, ‘Ooh, we got a lot to teach you,’” Sneed said with a smile Saturday during media day for the College Football Playoff national championship.
Thanks to Knapp, Sneed and several more Notre Dame and Ohio State players ranging from contributors to stars, the first all-Midwestern college football title game is not lacking Southern flavor.
The Irish and Buckeyes meet Monday night to decide the inaugural 12-team Playoff in Atlanta, the heart of the Southeastern Conference, and although there will not be an SEC team in sight, plenty of players from nearby have helped Ohio State and Notre Dame reach this point.
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The two title game rosters feature 33 players pulled straight from high schools in SEC territory, which stretches from Columbia, S.C., to Austin, Texas; six transfers from SEC schools — including Ohio State All-American Caleb Downs — three transfers who grew up in SEC states; and 13 other players from SEC-adjacent states North Carolina and Virginia.
“I feel like (football’s) bigger down here than it is up north,” said Notre Dame linebacker Jaiden Ausberry, who grew up in Baton Rouge, La., and whose father works in LSU’s athletic department. “It’s something that you’re really just born into. It’s your life. And I really just feel like there’s more of an emphasis on it from a younger age. So people train more. They worry about it, care for it more.”
How They Were Built
| Ohio State | Notre Dame | |
|---|---|---|
|
Most used players |
80 |
80 |
|
Transfers |
14 |
11 |
|
In-state HS recruits |
22 |
2 |
|
Regional HS recruits |
17 |
20 |
|
National HS recruits |
27 |
45 |
The rise of the SEC as the king conference in college football over the last 25 years has been directly tied to the growth of Sun Belt states and the cultural, emotional and financial commitment the people within those states have assigned to high school and college football.
“It’s unbelievable the amount of time and effort and good coaching that goes into Georgia football,” said Ohio State center Seth McLaughlin, an Alabama transfer and Georgia high school product who missed the second half of the Buckeyes’ season with an Achilles tendon tear. “It’s probably the same with Texas, probably the same with Florida, but there’s just so much time and resources dedicated to it.”
Recruiting rankings are far from perfect, but they tell a pretty clear story: The 12 SEC states have 194 players rated as a four- or five-star prospect in the 2025 class by 247Sports. The 14 states in the Big Ten’s coast-to-coast footprint have 107 four- or five-star recruits. But that includes recently annexed California, which leads Big Ten states with 32 blue-chippers. And Texas (49), Florida (38) and Georgia (38) all have more blue-chippers in the 2025 recruiting class than California.
McLaughlin went to Buford High School, a Georgia powerhouse that was run similarly to a college program.
“Being an SEC guy, I always thought the SEC was supreme and just all-encompassing of what college football was meant to be. And I think the new era of college football has changed the landscape dramatically,” he said. “I still believe that, up until the last few years, the SEC overall was a lot better conference, but this year, it’s different.”
SEC schools have won 13 national titles since 2006, and Clemson (two) and Florida State (one) from the ACC have combined for three more.
For a long while, Ohio State’s 2014 championship was the lone outlier in a decade and a half of southern-school dominance. Last year, archrival Michigan broke the streak, beating Washington in the title game — the first to not feature an SEC team since those Buckeyes beat Oregon in the first four-team CFP final.
Now it’s two straight years with no SEC teams, the first time that’s happened since 2004 and ‘05, when USC faced Oklahoma and then Texas in the BCS Championship Games. Texas and Oklahoma were in the Big 12 then. The Ohio State-Notre Dame matchup ensures that college football’s national champion will be a northern school in consecutive years for the first time since 1976-77, when Pitt and Notre Dame won it all.
Programs that want to compete at the highest level of college football these days need to find ways to tap into the South’s deep talent pool, no matter how far away their campuses are from it. Southern schools still do just fine protecting their turf, but the Buckeyes helped set the course for where the sport is today.
The arrival in 2012 of Ohio native Urban Meyer, who won two national championships as the head coach at Florida, changed the way the Buckeyes recruited to think more nationally, targeting the very best players no matter where they were from. Pipelines were built to Florida and Texas and throughout the South.
The 2014 title team featured quarterback J.T. Barrett from Texas, defensive end Joey Bosa and linebacker Raekwon McMillan from Florida, safety Vonn Bell from Georgia and running back Ezekiel Elliott from Missouri.
Elliott was from outside St. Louis, which is not traditional SEC territory, but he had offers from all over the country before picking Ohio State. Barrett never got the Texas offer he dreamed of growing up in Wichita Falls, and Ohio State beat out LSU for him. Bosa had family connections to Ohio State.
“But I think a guy like Raekwon and Vonn Bell, who didn’t really have ties like that, to go into the South and beat the SEC teams, we broke through,” said Mark Pantoni, Ohio State’s longtime general manager who followed Meyer from Gainesville, Fla., to Columbus.
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Ryan Day took over for Meyer in 2019 and kept the same recruiting blueprint in place.
Ohio State’s roster, which athletic director Ross Bjork said this year required more than $20 million to build, is the most talented in the country. The Buckeyes’ best offensive lineman: Donovan Jackson, five-star recruit from Texas. Their best defensive back: Downs, a five-star recruit from Georgia who transferred in from Alabama. Their dynamic duo at running back: TreVeyon Henderson, a five-star recruit from Virginia, and Quinshon Judkins, a transfer from Ole Miss who went to high school in Alabama. And then there is receiver Jeremiah Smith, the 19-year-old prodigy from just outside Miami.
“I visited Texas A&M, University of Texas, Alabama, and Ohio State was the only Midwest school I visited,” Jackson said. “I was fully convinced I was gonna commit to a school in the South. But when I visited (Ohio State) in 2019, it was the only place I felt home at.”
Notre Dame, a small private Catholic university in South Bend, Ind., has always recruited nationally, heavily targeting private high schools, especially Catholic schools. Irish efforts to be more of a recruiting presence in the South in recent years have produced some hits and some misses. All-America safety Kyle Hamilton, from Atlanta, was the team’s best player from 2019 to 2021 before becoming a first-round draft pick of the Baltimore Ravens. In October, four-star quarterback Deuce Knight from Mississippi decommitted from Notre Dame to go to Auburn.
Under coach Marcus Freeman, Notre Dame has more aggressively recruited the type of blue-chip recruits that Ohio State, Alabama and Georgia routinely target.
“We recruited Caleb (Downs) before he went to Alabama,” Freeman said.
Freeman got a win over Alabama when running back Jeremiyah Love (from St. Louis) picked the Irish over the Crimson Tide. Love has been Notre Dame’s most dynamic offensive player this season.
Knapp, who started all season at left tackle but will miss the title game with an ankle injury, is one of four players from Georgia, and freshman starting cornerback Leonard Moore is one of six Irish players from Texas.
And of course, quarterback Riley Leonard is from Fairhope, Ala., southeast of Mobile. He came to Notre Dame via transfer from Duke, but he also grew up a Fighting Irish fan, his great grandfather having played for Notre Dame in the 1940s.
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To get Smith out of South Florida, Ohio State had to beat nearby Miami for the five-star receiver.
“The close to home narrative is a lie. The world has never been smaller,” Buckeyes receiver coach Brian Hartline said. “If they value football over getting a tan, then we’ll take those guys.”
The SEC is nowhere to be found on the final weekend of the college football season, but there is still a good chance that southern star power will determine who takes the national championship trophy back north.
(Photo: Sean Gardner / Getty Images)
