Does Where You Grow Up Affect Your Chances of Being Drafted into the NFL?

The minimum rookie salary in the National Football League (NFL) is $450,000. First round picks often sign multi-year contracts worth more than $10 million. Players from some states are much more likely to receive college scholarships and eventually be drafted into the NFL, but it is not clear if this is a causal relationship. Utilizing data from Rivals and the NFL, I attempt to determine if where a player grew up has an impact on his chances of being drafted to play professional football. I focus on the top eight states, as it relates to percentage of recruits and my data set is repeated cross-sectional, analyzing the 2015 and 2016 draft classes. My dependent variables consist of state dummies, position dummies, rivals top 250 dummy, and pre-draft player grades. To the best of my knowledge, this is one of the first studies conducted on the relationship between geographical location and player draftability (how well a player is suited to be drafted). My results imply that some states have a positive effect on players being drafted, while others have a negative effect