Pennsylvania Football History

The 89th NFL Draft was held over the weekend and, for the 89th time, Pennsylvania high school alums were selected. While the state can claim to have had players picked in every NFL Draft to this point, the historical trends have shifted considerably over time. I’ll include any trends or observations that I found interesting below, but let’s start with a recap of Pennsylvania’s six selections in 2024:

This Year’s Selections

Marvin Harrison, Jr. (Arizona Cardinals, 1st Round, 4th Overall)

• St. Joe’s Prep’s 11th NFL Draft pick and first since the trio of D’Andre Swift, John Reid and Jon Runyan in 2020. Harrison spent his freshman year at LaSalle; he is the first former LaSalle player to be selected since Jimmy Morrissey in 2021 and the 7th Explorer chosen all-time.
• Harrison was the highest pick from Pennsylvania since Archbishop Wood’s Kyle Pitts was taken 4th overall by the Falcons in 2021. Saquon Barkley of Whitehall went 2nd overall in 2018.
• Harrison is the 68th wide receiver from Pennsylvania to be chosen in the NFL Draft and the first to be selected in the first round since Nazareth’s Jahan Dotson two years ago. Harrison’s father Marvin Sr. (a Roman Catholic grad) was the 19th overall selection as a wide receiver in the 1996 Draft.
• At 4th overall, Harrison is tied for the highest selection ever by a Pennsylvania wide receiver. In 1962, Williamstown’s Gary Collins was also taken 4th overall by the Browns. In 1950, Turtle Creek’s Leon Hart went first overall as an end, but that position was much closer to today’s tight end than a wide receiver.

Jared Verse (Los Angeles Rams, 1st Round, 19th Overall)

• Not long after Harrison became the 95th first round pick in Pennsylvania history, Verse became the 96th.
• Verse is just the second player from Central Columbia to be chosen in the NFL Draft, joining Mike Morucci. Morucci was picked in the 7th round (177th overall) by the Saints in 1980 as a running back out of Bloomsburg University.
• The fifth player from Pennsylvania drafted out of Florida State, Verse is also the 77th player to be selected by the Rams.
• Verse is the highest-drafted Pennsylvanian defensive lineman since Penn Hills’ Aaron Donald was taken 13th overall in 2014.

Tykee Smith (Tampa Bay Buccaneers, 3rd Round, 89th Overall)

• The 4th NFL Draft pick from Imhotep Charter, joining David Williams and DJ Moore (both in 2018) and Shaka Toney (2021).
• Smith is the 16th Pennsylvania draft pick chosen from Georgia and the first since Mark Webb of Archbishop Wood in 2021.

Jeremiah Trotter, Jr. (Indianapolis Colts, 5th Round, 155th Overall)

• Trotter was the second St. Joe’s Prep grad to be chosen in 2024, giving the school two drafts with multiple players selected in the past five years.
• Trotter is the seventh Pennsylanian to be selected from Clemson, but the first since Valley Forge Military Academy’s Jim Bundren was chosen in 1998.
• He is the 122nd linebacker drafted from a Pennsylvania high school, which is the fifth most-drafted position from the state.

Daequan Hardy (Buffalo Bills, 6th Round, 219th Overall)

• Hardy is the 12th Penn Hills graduate to be selected in the NFL Draft, tying the school with Bethlehem Liberty, Beaver Falls and Mt. Lebanon for the ninth-most picks in state history.
• First Penn Hills player to be selected since Donald.
• Hardy is the 191st Pennsylvanian to be selected out of Penn State, the most of any university.

MJ Devonshire (Las Vegas Raiders, 7th Round, 229th Overall)

• Devonshire is the 15th draft pick from Aliquippa, the fifth-most of any high school in the state. He is the first Quip to be selected since Tommie Campbell was chosen in 2011.
• He is the 177th selection from Pennsylvania to play collegiately at Pitt, which is second only to Penn State.
• He is the 25th Pennsylvania player to be selected by the Raiders, but only the second (joining fellow Pitt alum Morrissey) to be chosen during the team’s time in Las Vegas.

Historical Trends

• Pennsylvania’s six total selections this year equaled last year’s total and held serve with the state’s typical output this century. Since 2000, an average of 7.36 Pennsylvania high school alums have been chosen each year. However, the state historically has produced many more draft picks on an annual basis, as can be seen in the chart below:

From 1938 through 1987, the number of Pennsylvanians picked each year never dipped below double-digits. In fact, twenty or more players were chosen in all but two drafts from 1942 through 1971. The high-water mark was 1953, when 37 players from PA were chosen.

• As one would predict, Penn State and Pitt hold a commanding lead over all other universities in producing draft picks with Pennsylvania natives. All colleges with at least 15 draft picks are shown below:

• Harrison and Verse gave Pennsylvania two first round picks for the 26th time. The other occurrences are shown below (click to enlarge):

• Finally, here are a few quick lists of the most popular characteristics of PA high school alums in the NFL Draft:

Positions Played by Drafted Players

Drafted Players by Team

Drafted Players by Round

I’ve made two updates to the Harrisburg Patriot-News State Ranking Database.

First, I’ve added a sheet where you can view the first and latest date any team was ranked by the Patriot-News. Note that some schools show the ranking dates as “12/30/1899”; this is just Google Sheets’ way of saying “they’ve never been ranked.”

Second, due to page loading errors and crashing caused by a WAY-too-big spreadsheet, I’ve broken the all-time ranking sheet into more manageable chunks. Hopefully this allows everyone to look at the data, albeit in three sections.

Links:

First/Last Rank Date Sheet, by school

Weekly Rankings, 1988-1998

Weekly Rankings, 1999-2009

Weekly Rankings, 2010-2022

Pennsylvania high school football entered a new chapter in 1988 with the birth of the statewide playoff system. This created a path for teams to be crowned state champion (on the field, anyway) for the first time.

This new era led to the creation of the first subjective statewide polls, which the Harrisburg Patriot-News began that same year. In this database, all presently known state rankings have been documented. I’ll break up the rest of the important info in bullet points below, and then we’ll take a look at some trends, interesting facts, etc., at the end of this post.

What to Know About This Database

PLEASE look over this section before digging into the data, as many of your questions will be answered here:

• There are missing weeks in this dataset. As of the end of the 2022 season, there are about 577 weeks where we’d expect rankings from the P-N. This dataset has 546 weeks completed as of the posting of this article, so 94.6% of the rankings are input and complete. Not bad! But I’m still searching for 30 hard-to-find rankings to complete the set. Those missing weeks can be found below; if you have any info that can help me fill in these blanks, please let me know.

• Honorable Mention selections were not made in the preseason rankings fr 1989 and 2020. Additionally, no rankings were published for Week 1 in 2020.
• To my knowledge, the Patriot-News rankings were the first subjective statewide rankings in Pennsylvania. Other mathematical systems (like the Saylor Ratings and Dunkel Index) had been published prior to 1988. The Patriot-News rankings were compiled by Rod Frisco from 1988 through about 2009. Since then, they’ve been selected by Eric Epler.
• This database currently consists of 47,833 entries. Due to this size, there are bound to be small errors here and there, but a lot of time has been spent making sure this database is as accurate as possible. At times, there were errors in the rankings themselves, like a team being ranked 10th AND as an Honorable Mention or other copyediting mistakes, and those have been corrected in this database. In 1990 and 1998, Whitehall was ranked in one classification for part of the year, and then a correction was made in later weeks. The same thing happened to Bellwood-Antis in 2019, Cambridge Springs in 1989, and may have occurred other times that I haven’t caught yet. I’ve chosen to leave these rankings alone for the time being, but may correct them at a later time.
• I made one edit to the state rankings, but I think I was justified to do so. In the 1997 Class A Final rankings, Riverside (Taylor) was No. 1 and Sharpsville was No. 2. However, Sharpsville had beaten Riverside, 10-7, in the state title game a few days before. I’m feel confident that this was a typo or a transcription error of some sort, but if someone can correct me, I’ll switch the rankings back.
• Teams have been listed in the tables by the name the school had prior to any consolidation or split. So you’ll see a row for Downingtown, a row for Downingtown East, and one for Downingtown West, for example.
• Teams were also listed with the district they were a member of in that year. For example, early years will show Mount Carmel in District 11, while more recent years will have them in District 4. The only exception to this involves the old District 12. Prior to the late 1990s (I believe), the PIAA designated teams in the far Northeastern part of the state as District 12 before folding them into District 2. To prevent confusion with the current District 12 (the Philadelphia Public & Catholic Leagues), I used District 2 for all of these schools throughout their ranking histories.
• Some of the tables shown here have “Rank Points” and “Average Rank Points” columns. This was just an informal way to tally the quality of each team’s ranking at a raw and average level. Points were assigned similar to a track meet or the college football AP poll (10 points for 1st, 9 points for 2nd, etc.). A higher average means a team is ranked highly more often than a team with a lower average.

A Few Notable Things About the Data…

Let’s get to the fun part. You can find links to the data at the bottom of the post, but let’s dig in and look at a couple interesting things here:

• The first-ever top-ranked teams? In 1988, the preseason Number 1 teams were North Hills (4A), Aliquippa (3A), Sto-Rox (2A) and Dunmore (1A). Names that have had relevance over the years, to say the least.
• The number of Honorable Mention teams in each class has remained fairly stable over Epler’s tenure, especially since the advent of six classes. Most weeks, each class has between five and seven HM teams. Frisco, particularly in the 1990s, named many more HM teams per class. Some weeks featured as many as 24 HM teams in one classification. However, I don’t think this has dramatically impacted the overall data. Below is a chart showing how many total teams were ranked each year. It’s been fairly level over time when you take into account that some dips are due to years missing several weeks (and COVID shortening the 2020 season, of course).

• Total teams to be ranked No. 1 all-time? 112. I don’t know about you, but this number was quite a bit higher than I had expected.
• Southern Columbia has been ranked for 535 weeks, 200 of which at No. 1. Both are most in the state. This means the Tigers have been ranked for 98% of known weeks since 1988. They’ve been No. 1 for nearly 37% of those weeks.
• Here are the 15 schools with the most weeks at No. 1:

• Weeks at No. 1 by PIAA District:

• Percentage of all ranked teams to come from each district:

• Of the 95% of weeks found so far, 51.6% of ranked teams come from the Eastern part of the state (Districts 1, 2, 3, 4, 11 & 12), while 48.4% come from the West.
• Teams with the most weeks ranked at each spot:

• One more table, just for fun. Here are the schools with the most all-time weeks in the rankings without rising above a certain spot. In other words, Wilson has been ranked for more weeks than any other school that has not reached No. 1. As always, remember that this data is only based on the 95% of found rankings and may change as additional weeks are input:

LINKS TO THE DATA

All-Time Weekly Rankings

School-by-School Data

All-Time Weekly No. 1 Ranked Teams

With the 2023 NFL Draft beginning Thursday, let’s take a look at the history of Pennsylvania high school graduates throughout the history of the draft. The following data is as complete as I could make it at the moment, but small tweaks will likely be made if and when additions and corrections are to be found.

Here is a list of every player from a Pennsylvania high school who has been drafted into the NFL since the first draft in 1936.

Here is a list of every Pennsylvania player drafted into the AFL (1960-1966).

Here are all of the players from Pennsylvania drafted into the short-lived All-America Football Conference (1947-1949).

[UPDATE: Thanks to the suggestion of Bob Greenburg, I’ve added a list of players drafted by the NFL, AFL, and AAFC sorted by their high school. Now you can easily view every draftee from a high school. Here is the link.]

On a school-by-school basis, eight high schools have had at least 15 draftees (counting players twice if they were picked by two leagues) across these three professional leagues. All of these schools are current WPIAL members with the exception of Bethlehem Liberty, Johnstown (which left the WPIAL in 2000), and Altoona, which has been a WPIAL member at times over the years.

Bethlehem Liberty (15), Allentown Allen (14), Hazleton (13) have the most selections by non-WPIAL schools. This total includes players who may have attended multiple schools (such as Micah Parsons, who gives both Central Dauphin and Harrisburg one draft selection each). There are likely a few inconsistencies in this list due to high schools changing their names over the years (like Neumann-Goretti, which used to be St. John Neumann High School), but this data should be nearly entirely complete. See the list of every school with a draftee here.

There likely aren’t many surprises when it comes to the most common colleges attended by Pennsylvania HS grads who were drafted, other than perhaps Miami’s presence in the top 10:

Player positions are sometimes very fluid in the draft process and players in the two-way era were usually only listed by their offensive position, but here are the ten most common positions played by Pennsylvania grads who were drafted:

As for the teams that have drafted the most Pennsylvanians, there aren’t many surprises here, either:

The number of drafted Pennsylvania players has dropped greatly over time. There are many reasons for this, but two stand out to me: fewer players are drafted today and the concentration of football talent has largely shifted south and west over the past 50 years or so. In 1976, there were 487 total selections in the NFL Draft. Today, that number fluctuates between about 253 and 260 depending on compensatory picks, so the total volume of selections is much lower today.

The peak years for Pennsylvanians in the NFL Draft came from the mid-1940s through the late-1960s. From 1942 through 1971, there were only two NFL Drafts where fewer than 20 Pennsylvanians were selected. In twelve of those drafts, more than thirty players from the state were selected, with an all-time high of 39 in 1957. Compare that to more modern times, when only three drafts since 2005 have seen 10 Pennsylvanians chosen. The last time twenty players from the state were drafted in one year was 1984.

When it comes to first round picks, Pennsylvania high schools have produced 94 of them in the NFL Draft, from Boyd Brumbaugh of Steel Valley in 1938 to Jahan Dotson of Nazareth last year. A list of all Pennsylvanian first round picks can be found here.

The 1956 draft was the high-water mark for the state, with four alums going in the top 10 and five in the top 12. Bob Pellegrini (Shannock Valley) went 4th, Joe Marconi (East Bethlehem) went 6th, Jack Losch (Williamsport) went 8th, Lenny Moore (Reading) went 9th, and Ed Vereb (Pittsburgh Central Catholic) went 12th.

The following schools have had multiple first round selections:

That’s a decent amount of info to digest, so we’ll stop there. Please send any corrections or additions my way and, as always, thanks for reading.

A database of every All-State football selection, one of the biggest projects I’ve ever attempted on this site, has finally been completed. It was begun in 2015, put on the shelf for a long time, and finally completed following about seven months of work throughout 2022. The result: a listing of all 18,836 known All-State football players from the first Associated Press team in 1939 through last season’s selections.

Before getting to the results of this project, there are a few things that I should detail and explain. This was a massive project and it will be beneficial to understand the caveats that may exist in the data:

• This data is based upon the All-State teams selected by five sources:
  1. The Associated Press (1939-2008). This was the original All-State selection source and was the only selector in the state for various stretches of time.
  2. The Pennsylvania Football Writers (2009-Present). In early incarnations it was called the Pennsylvania Sports Writers team. This organization of writers from across the state picked up the AP’s mantle when it decided to stop naming teams.
  3. The United Press International (1952-1984). The UPI chose teams were chosen by UPI writers until 1979, when they were selected by college football recruiters. The 1983 and 1984 teams were termed “The UPI Pride of Pennsylvania” teams and selected the 25 best players in the state rather than a full roster of players.
  4. Pennsylvania Football News (1998-Present). PFN chose between two and four teams per year based on classification until recently, when it has picked one team per classification with a larger number of slots (i.e., 3-4 quarterbacks make the team).
  5. PennLive (2018-Present). In 2018, PennLive began picking one offensive and one defensive team representing the best players in the state regardless of class. While it is by far the newest team included in this project, PennLive (and the associated Harrisburg Patriot-News) are, in my mind, the paper of record when it comes to statewide high school football. Thus, I included these teams.

All data from 1939 through 2011 were found in the 2012 Pennsylvania Football News Resource Guide. Selections from 2012-Present were found via many hours of internet research.

• The data is as complete as humanly possible. I’ve checked and re-checked the raw data in this project multiple times, but the size of it still allows the chance for errors to exist. I know there are bound be typos and name misspellings, but I am fairly confident that these should be few and far between. There were at times errors and typos in the source material for this project, but I have done my best to correct those. If you see a missing name and can provide evidence for its inclusion, please let me know (pafbhistory@gmail.com or @pa_fb_history on Twitter).
• All-State selections vs. All-State players. On the sheets that show total All-Staters for each school, remember that these count each individual selection, not distinct players. For example, if a player was selected to two different All-State teams in the same year, that counts as two selections for the school’s overall tally.
• Schools are listed as they appeared in that year’s All-State list. I chose to list a player as representing the school he played for the year he was selected rather than use the school’s current name. This means that, for example, all selections for Downingtown are separated from those from Downingtown East and Downingtown West. The Saylor Record Spreadsheets often lump the “original” school’s statistics in with one of the new versions formed by a high school splitting into multiple buildings, but for consistency’s sake I decided to keep all of the school’s separated. If you’d like, you can simply find all of the past versions of your school’s program and lump their selections together to form an overall number – that’s up to you.
• Selections are heavily skewed to more recent years. The graph below illustrates how dramatic the rise in overall selections has been over time. This is for a few reasons. First of all, there are currently more services that select All-State teams than there were in various periods of history. Second, those selectors tend to choose more teams (i.e., a 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and sometimes 4th team) than in early years of All-State teams. Third, selectors in the modern era often choose separate teams for each classification rather than use the original method of choosing one team for all of the programs in the state. Finally, there are more positions selected today than in the early era. For example, the AP (which began selecting teams in 1939) only chose offensive players until 1969. All of these factors combine to heavily favor more recent dynasties and strong programs than ones that existed prior to the mid-1970s. From 1939-1951, only 33 players were selected each year, with the exception of 1942 and 1944, when only 22 players were chosen. Today, an average of around 700 selections are made each year, with an all-time high of 787 in 2016.

In all, 711 different schools have had at least one All-State selection over the past 83 seasons. Check out all of the data below:

All-State Selections (Listed by School)

All-State Selections (Listed by Year)

School Totals

Top Ten Schools by Total Selections (click the link above to view all schools)

SOURCES:

The Pennsylvania Football News Resource Guide, 2012 by Rich Vetock & Tom Elling (teams from 1939-2011)

PennLive.com (various teams from 2012-Present)

Newspapers.com (various teams and research to resolve corrections)

Pennsylvania Football News (PFN teams from 2012-Present)

We’ve all seen commercials for upcoming movies that begin with “In a world where [insert apocalyptic event].“. Today, let’s talk about a world where the PIAA adopted another state’s playoff system in order to crown its state football champions. We’re going to take all 550-plus football-playing schools in Pennsylvania and shove them into the process Illinois uses to determine its champions. Hopefully this serves as a fun thought experiment and exercise to consider the various components that make a state’s playoff system “good.”

Why not stick with the current PIAA system?

First, I’m not advocating for the PIAA to scrap its current setup. To begin with, it’ll never change. Period. And while the way we choose state champs and playoff participants is…well, kind of odd when you think about it, it is rooted in several decades of tradition at this point. But if you haven’t tried this yet, I encourage you to explain our state’s playoff procedure to an acquaintance from another state. It’s not as simple as it may initially seem. Our playoff system, which is dominated by 12 small kingdoms that are loosely associated and Frankensteined together each November and December, can lead to some difficult-to-explain scenarios to the uninitiated. In many states, the overarching organization creates one uniform playoff method. In Pennsylvania, all 12 districts choose their state playoff entries on their own and then they enter in various weeks of the bracket. You may think it works just fine, but it’s nevertheless unique.

Why Illinois?
There are a few reasons why I chose to base this project on how the IHSA determines its playoff fields in Illinois:

• Illinois is a state that is comparable to Pennsylvania in number of football-playing schools, population, and geographic size (although Illinois is a bit bigger in land area).
• The system Illinois uses (more on that below) is simple and straightforward, making it easy enough to copy for our uses here.
• Illinois uses a statewide bracket where all teams enter at the same point, which would eliminate many (if not all) of the bizarre scenarios we face in Pennsylvania where a two-win team plays a one-win team for a district title or subregionals must be formed between multiple districts. In short, it produces a clean, easy-to-follow bracketing procedure.

How does the Illinois system work?

Here’s the meat and potatoes of the statewide playoff system used in Illinois. I’ll add how I’ve modified each step for Pennsylvania, too. Illinois has 8 classes for football and has 32-team brackets for each class, meaning 256 teams make the postseason. To be consistent with our classification structure, I’ll be putting together 6 brackets of 32 teams in Pennsylvania (a total of 192 schools entering the playoffs).

1. All teams statewide are ranked in order of wins at the end of the regular season (in Illinois, all teams play 9 regular season games). School size is not considered at this point. All 9-0, 8-1, 7-2, and 6-3 teams get into the playoff field. Many years, all 5-4 teams make the playoffs and occasionally a few 4-5 teams can enter, too, if wins must go that low to get 256 total entries. Because much of Pennsylvania plays a 10-week regular season, I’ll use that many games to determine playoff participants (meaning games through the weekend of October 28th will still count toward a team’s playoff position). Also, because we will only take 192 entries in this simulation, the cutoff will be higher, meaning some 6-4 teams won’t be selected.
2. Ties between schools with the same number of wins are broken by Illinois’ version of power points (or win points, or bonus points, or whatever you’d like to call them). Eastern PA Football posts a similar statistic for all teams statewide, so I’ll use that in this exercise as a close facsimile. I’ll prorate each team’s number to balance out the rating for teams that play varying numbers of regular season games.
3. All conference champions, regardless of record, automatically qualify into the field. I’ll be using the league rankings page from Eastern PA Football to determine conference champions.
4. Once the final list of 256 Illinois teams is formed (192 in Pennsylvania), they are re-ranked by school enrollment, largest to smallest. The top 32 schools form 8A, the next 32 are 7A, and so on. Due to this process, a traditional 4A program in Pennsylvania may play in the 5A or 3A playoffs in our simulation depending on how many bigger or smaller schools qualify. In essence, your classification doesn’t really come into effect until/unless you enter the postseason.
5. Remember those ratings from Step 2? Those are used to seed teams within their classification bracket to form the finalized playoff. So the top-rated 6A team will be paired with the 32nd rated 6A team, the No. 2 6A will play the No. 31 6A, and so on. All of this is done without regard to geographic location in Illinois’ two largest brackets (8A and 7A). For the other six classes, Illinois splits the state into a north bracket and a south bracket to cut down on travel costs. In our thought experiment, I’ll make all six brackets statewide because I think it leads to more interesting matchups and we don’t need to pay for virtual gas. You could see rematches of league/district opponents in Round 1, or you may see a Lehigh Valley team paired with a team from Pittsburgh. It’s a truly statewide bracket.
6. The final step: you play the games! The top seeds host, although in our fictionalized Pennsylvania bracket neutral sites could potentially be used in extreme circumstances. In the post-COVID world, the PIAA has become much more open to having teams host true home games in the state playoffs, meaning this really wouldn’t be a huge shift in our state.

So what’s next?

After this weekend’s (10-28 to 10/29) games are completed, I’ll run through the steps above and create all six brackets. I’ll publish them either Sunday or early next week. After that, I’ll publish updated fictional brackets each week after simulating that week’s round using either the CalPreps.com or Massey ratings websites. Be sure to follow along to see if your team qualifies for the (fictional) postseason and to track how far it goes.

REMEMBER: this is just for fun. If you’re a huge Pennsylvania high school football and/or bracketing nerd like me, it should be fun. If not: I don’t hate your school! I swear!

I recently had the chance to sit down with The Football History Dude and talk about the history of high school football in Pennsylvania. We touch on a number of different topics and discuss where PFH might be headed in the future. Give it a listen!

Listen Here

Now that the 2021 PIAA Championships have been decided, take a look at the updated list of all-time Pennsylvania high school football champions here. This list tracks each champion in the PIAA statewide playoff era (1988-present) in addition to annual champions as chosen by the Saylor Rating System (1887-1987).

This year’s champions:

• Mt. Lebanon (6A)
  • Previous state championships (3): 1958, 1970 & 1981
• Penn-Trafford (5A)
  • Previous state championships: None
• Aliquippa (4A)
  • Previous state championships (5): 1952, 1955, 1991, 2003 & 2018
• Central Valley (3A)
  • Previous state championships (1): 2020
• Southern Columbia (2A)
  • Previous state championships (11): 1994, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2015, 2017, 2018, 2019 & 2020
• Bishop Guilfoyle (1A)
  • Previous state championships (3): 2014, 2015 & 2016

It was an historic year in Hershey for the WPIAL, as it became the first district to win four state championships in the same year. Prior to the six-class system’s introduction in 2016, the WPIAL took three-out-of-four titles in 2001, 2005 and 2007.