Every Friday night in Ohio, some offense puts up 40-plus points and the box score gets passed around like it means something. We pulled every scored game from 253 Ohio high school programs across the 2021-2025 seasons and asked a direct question: does leading the state in points-per-game actually correlate with producing Division 1 talent? The answer is yes, but it is weaker than most people assume, and the state's number 1 scoring offense is the clearest proof of it.
Methodology, stated plainly
We pulled game-level scoring data for every Ohio school across the 2021 through 2025 seasons and dropped any game with no recorded score, 2,282 of 13,424 raw Ohio rows. That left 11,142 valid game-rows across 253 schools. We set a 30-game minimum to keep small samples out of the ranking. 224 of 253 schools cleared it. Points-per-game is a straight average of points scored across every qualifying game for that school.
For the recruiting side, we pulled every player from the 2022 through 2026 grad classes at each school, joined to their college offers, and counted distinct players carrying at least one FBS or FCS offer. We ran that count for the top 10 scoring offenses specifically, and separately for all 224 qualifying schools statewide, to test whether the two numbers actually move together.
Two flags up front, in the interest of receipts over polish. First, 3 of the primary top 10 (Tri-Village, Liberty Center, Bluffton) have game data for only 3 of the 5 seasons in the window, a real gap in the source data confirmed by pulling every row for those schools regardless of score. A stricter cut requiring 4-plus seasons of coverage swaps those three out for London, Ursuline, and Perkins, with Anderson holding the number 1 spot on that version. Second, 61 of the 224 qualifying schools carry no sub-region tag in the source data, a completeness gap, not evidence those programs lack a region.
The top 10
| Rank | School | City | PPG | Games | Seasons |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Tri-Village* | New Madison | 44.4 | 35 | 2023-2025 |
| 2 | Liberty Center* | Liberty Center | 42.4 | 51 | 2023-2025 |
| 3 | Anderson | Cincinnati | 42.1 | 75 | 2021-2025 |
| 4 | West Branch | Beloit | 41.9 | 63 | 2021-2025 |
| 5 | Streetsboro | Streetsboro | 41.8 | 56 | 2021-2025 |
| 6 | Highland | Medina | 39.7 | 69 | 2021-2025 |
| 7 | Avon | Avon | 39.1 | 78 | 2021-2025 |
| 8 | Bluffton* | Bluffton | 38.9 | 43 | 2023-2025 |
| 9 | Villa Angela-St. Joseph | Cleveland | 38.5 | 52 | 2021-2025 |
| 10 | Liberty Benton | Findlay | 37.6 | 49 | 2022-2025 |
*Game data covers 2023-2025 only; the other 7 have full 2021-2025 coverage. No PPG ties at any of these ranks, out of 224 qualifying programs statewide.
Tri-Village, led by head coach Matt Hopkins, built that number over 35 games since 2023. It is the best scoring mark of any program in the qualifying pool, full stop.
The correlation, honestly
Across all 224 qualifying schools, PPG and distinct D1-offered player count correlate at r = 0.24 (Spearman rank) and r = 0.25 (Pearson), n = 224. That is a real, positive relationship. It is also a weak one: points explain roughly 6% of the variance in D1 production statewide.
Split into scoring quintiles, the direction holds. The top-scoring fifth of the state (35.5 PPG average) produces 3.85 D1-offered players per school on average, against 1.00 for the bottom fifth (16.5 PPG average). The clearest version of the trend shows up at quarterback: the D1-QB rate climbs from 2% of programs in the bottom quintile to 31% in the top. But it is not a clean staircase. The third quintile (25.6 PPG) beats the fourth (29.9 PPG) on both "produced any D1 player" (75% versus 57%) and D1-QB rate (18% versus 16%).
Then there is Tri-Village. The single highest-scoring offense in the state over this window has zero D1-offered players in our database for the 2022-2026 grad classes. That is the clearest single data point in the set: raw scoreboard output can come from scheme, a soft schedule, or a running clock as easily as it comes from D1-caliber talent.
Where the top 10 does carry real signal: 3 of the 10 (Anderson, West Branch, Avon) produced at least one D1-offered quarterback, a 30% rate against a 14.7% statewide baseline, roughly double. Anderson's D1 depth is led by TE Caden Piening (grad 2025, 25 offers) and TE Brody Foley (grad 2022, 22 offers). Avon leads all top-10 programs with 10 D1-offered players, headlined by CB Jakob Weatherspoon (29 offers) and RB Jakorion Caffey (19 offers).
What it means for players and parents
Weight scoring the way the data does: a real signal, not a guarantee. A 40-PPG offense is more likely than a 20-PPG offense to be developing a quarterback recruiters notice, that gap is the sharpest one in the data. But scoring is a poor stand-in for overall D1 volume. The two deepest D1 rosters in this top 10 belong to Anderson (8 D1 players) and Avon (10 D1 players), and both built that depth through sustained recruiting pipelines, not one gaudy season. Do not write off a mid-pack scoring program on offense alone.
Where this series goes next
Next week: Ohio's top defenses by points allowed, and whether stopping points correlates with D1 defensive production the same way offense does, better, or worse. After that, we run this same method on more states. Every number in this piece has a query behind it. Ask us for the receipts on any of it.