Everyone is well aware that Penn State is the most dominant team of the last decade. But how do they, and every other power program look, when examined through the lens of utilizing their in-state talent?

There are two ways we will be reviewing this: the first is raw points, so how many points Pennsylvania natives scored for the Nittany Lions at the national tournament. The second is percentage, so what percent of their total points are scored by in-state vs out-of-state, to determine which programs lean on their homegrown stars the most.

The goal of this will be to look at the numbers as a whole and the numbers as they compare just within your team. We're starting off with PSU and will examine several other schools who have done well at NCAAs the past few years.

First, we'll tally up the total team points of Penn State scored at every NCAA tournament since 2012, which is the first year we have accurate data for across every team.

As you can see, Penn State scores A LOT of team points, and they score the majority by a slight margin using PA natives. Spoiler alert, but they score more points from in-state talent than any other school. They also score a ton from guys committing from out of state, which is a balance most other programs have not been able to successfully replicate in this time frame.

PSU seemed to rely more heavily on in-state talent early on, which makes sense given the makeup of the roster when head coach Cael Sanderson got there and where he was able to make quick inroads in recruiting. Guys like Ed Ruth, Nico Megaldus, and Quentin Wright were part of those first teams.

Now let's break these down into percentages, and see how their point differences have evolved over time.

While there is a bit of ebb and flow to these percentages, they are currently trending toward PSU's points coming from non-Pennsylvanians. Why that is as it pertains to the talent coming out of high school is unclear, and also sometimes a team could target a recruit from their own state, but have already recruited one of similar caliber from another state.

For example, while Penn State could have undoubtedly chased after any number of talented upperweights, they landed Bo Nickal. Obviously, just about any college coach would have also liked to have Nickal on their team. However, this is precisely why we are analyzing not only total points, but in-state vs out-of-state as a percentage of your team score.

Just as any coach would have liked Nickal, every program would similarly be after Zain Retherford. In the case of PSU, being able to have both on the team shows the recruiting pull from out-of-state to a power program as well as the ability to keep the best recruits home.

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What is extremely difficult to determine, and what we will try to not spend too much time on, is how coaches develop their talent. There is no way to truly know if Zain could have done just as well at any other institution, and how much staying in-state helped him. Those same questions will apply to Logan Stieber for Ohio State, J'den Cox for Missouri, etc.

Now, the final piece of the puzzle is the pool of talent from which these schools are pulling. Pennsylvania natives always lead all states in number of qualifiers for the NCAA tournament, and in turn score the most points of any state. So it shouldn't be terribly surprising that the flagship institution of the strongest high school state has the ability to score points in bunches using guys from PA.

What can't be denied though is that both the amount and percent of points Penn State is getting from PA natives is decreasing, while their point totals are not. Additionally, they will very likely have at least seven starters, and as many as nine, on next year's team that came from out of state. However, their one guaranteed in-state starter is a three-time finalist and two-time champ. This speaks to Penn State's national recruiting brand, as well as their ability to pluck the top level in-state talent.

It doesn't appear to be trending back to a focus of in-state talent, either. While Jarod Verkleeren is favored to be the starter at 149 this year, two other of his fellow 2017 recruits who should start are from out of state (Nick Lee and Brady Berge). Similarly from 2018, Michael Beard is a PA native, but guys like Roman Bravo-Young, Aaron Brooks, Joe Lee, Seth Nevills, and Brody Teske are all from other states.

Coming up next in the series will be Ohio State, another team whose roster was built around in-state talent but the coaching staff have swung to using more wrestlers from outside the Buckeye State as their national recruiting footprint increased.