UM Needs to Recruit Montana Better & Other Fun Facts about Where NFL Players Come From

Combination of factors:  Lots of immigrants, no where to play except outer boros, outer boro schools don't have budgets for football and there is no major interest to provide funding.   As someone who went to school in NYC, you just never even thought of playing organized football, more likely to play soccer, basketball, baseball, squash, tennis, or maybe hockey.

Football skills require a lot of training and development. Yes, having a larger pool of possible players increases the likelihood of finding a Denard Robinson but that's the crux - it is only the pool of possible players. 

If raw numbers were the only critical factor then we should see most of our top sprinters come from the big cities in China and India - yet world wide sprints have been dominated largely by smaller nations that have sunk a lot of resources into identifying and training sprinters.

I don't know what is the exact alchemy but it will have to have a resonable size pool, a lot of local football support and a strong high school coaching system. We've seen clusters of top players before - remember when Unitas, Namath, Montana and other QBs all came out of western Pennsylvania?

In the era of the Internet and the 24/7 sports news cycle, every big school (e.g. in the top 50) recruits nationwide and the top 10 can expect to have a shot at any kid who is good anywhere. The last scouting trick left is identifying the good kid with great potential on a bad team. 

you need calm down tough guy.

Yeah, upstate New York has a lot of land, not much in the way of football talent. My high school alma mater plays in the same league as Onondaga (Mike Hart's alma mater) and has a football roster of about 23 kids. A few years ago an Australian exchange student, who had never played football before, became the starting quarterback (and kicker and linebacker) and was by far the best player on the team. Nope, not much talent in the area and dramatically declining enrollment across the state doesn't make for a strong talent pool.

And I pass more cows than cars on my hour long commute to work.

The political boundaries of American cities are anachronistically frozen at about their 1900-WWII extent; since then neighboring areas, generally relatively well-to-do, have resisted incorporation for tax and other reasons. The population within those anachronistic boundaries is correspondingly deceptively small. The real measure of a city's size is its Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area (SMSA). Taking just Buffalo as an example, per WIKI,

The Buffalo-Niagara Falls Metropolitan Statistical Area is a metropolitan area . . . with a population, as of the 2010 census, of 1,135,509 inhabitants.