Where does the Penn State Football brand rank according to high school players?

With their black shoes and basic blues, Penn State is one of the more popular and recognizable brands in college football, but where do they rank according to the demographic that is the future of the sport?

Official Visit recorded their annual Brandy Study to see where high school football players rank college football programs in terms of their brand, and Penn State Football seems to have fallen a bit in recent years, though they are still towards the top of the list.

An 11-11 record over the past two seasons certainly doesn’t help, though it’s still a better record than teams ahead of them in the ranking such as Texas and Florida, each of which had sub-.500 records in 2021.

However, recent success clearly did not play as much of a factor as you might think, as the defending Big Ten champions fall surprisingly at No. 16. Maybe most of the 1,000 kids surveyed were from Ohio?

However, much of the top 20 is probably about what you might have expected, just maybe in a different order — though it’s tough to argue with the top 3-5.

As we have discussed on our site before, winning is not one of the things that recruits value the most when deciding where they want to go to school. If it was, Penn State would not be staring down the barrel of back-to-back top 10 recruiting classes fresh off of a pair of disappointing seasons. If a program has struggled as of late, the recruits believe that they can help turn it around.

These rankings certainly aren’t perfect, as 1,000 is an extremely small sample size among millions of kids who play high school football, but it does give a good indication of how younger generations might view the college football landscape. Many of those surveyed may not even be Division I recruits, but it is still the same demographic that have similar mindsets, some just happen to be more gifted athletically than others.

As a program that is ninth in all-time winning percentage, ninth in bowl winning percentage, seventh in NFL Draft picks, ninth in total weeks ranked in the AP Poll, and 11th in consensus All-Americans, a case could be made for Penn State Football to be a top 10 brand in the sport.

However, with much of that success coming before any current high schoolers were born, it’s understandable as to why they didn’t crack the top 10.