I doubt I'll ever be fully interested enough to find the time to post some of the data I've been tinkering with, but I have some thoughts about the premise you reference. Everyone of course knows that rankings matter and so on and so forth. Rankings can also get inflated, and they can trend pretty strongly at times towards groupthink inflation at the analyst level. A good example of this occurs when a school riding high starts going after a player and his ranking begins to climb without any other new data points. This happened with Texas in the 2000's, Notre Dame before then, and you could argue it's happening now with the SEC in general.
Rather than leave it at that, I played around with something like the last 4 classes, and rankings for players within each state, and then compared the top 100 national players distributed by state versus overall share of national population. ie., if state x produces 10% of the top 100 players but contributes only 5% of the national population, that state either overindexes legitimately in producing CFB talent, or they're being overrated in the rankings. A quick and dirty continuation of this can be done by then looking at NFL distribution of players by state. Did the same percentage of overindexing occur for each state? Did it swing the other way? What happened?
Texas, California and Florida all pretty much overindex with football talent produced against their population by more or less consistent percentages at the CFB and NFL levels. Two states stick way the fuck out, however, and in opposite directions. The state of Ohio is consistently underrated by the services vs how many players from OH actually wind up in the NFL. In the 10 states I looked at, which were the SEC states (minus KY, MO and AR), Texas, Cali, and Ohio, the difference wasn't even close. In the opposite direction is Georgia. That state appears to be consistently overrated when comparing recruiting rankings to players in the NFL. And I mean, it's dramatic. So which trough is a healthy chunk of the SEC feeding off of the most outside of FL and TX? Georgia. It's overrated and pumping the rankings for multiple SEC schools in the process.
I'm traveling and don't have the numbers in front of me, so you can choose to take my word for it, dig in yourself, ignore it, or doubt it. But I figured I'd pass it on in case someone wanted to sniff around further, since I'd sort of sated my interest on it and got busy with other shit.