Recruiting rankings matter, and getting top talent is a prerequisite for winning college football championships. Teams need to sign a bunch of four- and five-star players to have any chance at all.

It's common knowledge by now that a few states (Florida, Texas, California) have more of this elite talent than anywhere else. But just how clustered are America's best four- and five-star football players? I counted, in every state and the District of Columbia.

All the data here come from the 247Sports Composite, which aggregates ratings agencies' evaluations of players. Our state-by-state blue-chip counts don't align perfectly with the website's national count of them, but their resulting figures are within decimal points of equal for each year. (I counted manually and the website is always updating.)

Here's how many blue-chip players have come from every state in the last five years, with each state's national percentage of elite talent attached:

The top five states have more than half the country's blue-chip players for the last five years, at 53.3 percent of the total.

Florida, Texas and California really do have so, so many more elite recruits than anybody else. Between the three, they've got about 40 percent of them. The top nine states have two-thirds of the national total.

Georgia has pretty well entrenched itself as the fourth-best recruiting state, with some combination of Ohio and Louisiana at Nos. 5 and 6. Then there's a mass of states that produces between 2 and 5 percent of the country's top recruits every year, and then a bunch more that almost (or literally) never produce elite players. Nine states haven't had any blue-chip players in the last five years. Some states have never, ever had them.

It makes a difference. Check out maps No. 6 through 9 here, which point out a few things: Champions come from areas with lots of good players, the best players are hugely clumped together in the big three states and the SEC and Pac-12 are operating at enormous geographic advantages.

This picture never really changes, either.

I went into this research expecting to find that some states have particular years where they would erupt and produce far more blue-chip prospects than normal. Not really!

States' shares of the national blue-chip ranks stay almost the exact same every year, with very few exceptions.

The state with the biggest jump in blue-chippers this year is Michigan, whose 10 four- and five-star kids mark, in total, a 2.3 percent increase over its average from the last four classes. That's the maximum.

The players change every year, but recruiting, on the whole, barely changes at all. If your state has a lot of elite players, it'll keep doing that. And if it doesn't, it'll keep doing that, too.