[Ben E Lou]

Interesting comments here. To clarify my position a bit, I'd say this: if you're going to have the names of real-life high schools in there, they don't need to be a potential point of distraction for people, and they can be now.

Stewart-Quitman and Cross Keys, for example, have five and six wins respectively this decade, all against horrid opposition. Combined, the two of them gave up 44.7 points per game in the recent season. Seeing either of them with any reputation above 5 on a 1 to 100 scale pretty much ruins any sense of the universe being immersive. But I just fired up TCY, and S-Q had a 52, and CK an 88. So in order to feel any sense of realism whatsoever, I end up ignoring the high schools entirely. It's a shame to have a feature in there like that getting ignored.

Similarly, there are schools that produce D1 prospects nearly every single year. Sure, there's some ebb and flow, but at least in my home state of Georgia (which the last time I checked was #4 in the nation in production of D1 talent), there are at least a dozen or so schools that were D1 factories when I was in high school over 20 years ago that are still D1 factories today. (Tucker has had, what, 9 straight starting tailbacks that have gone D1, and 2 in the NFL now?) And the Stewart-Quitmans of the world were going 0-10 with 50PF and 400PA back then, and still are today.

All of this goes back to why I suggest a user-editable high school reputation table. Just slap a starting point in there based on the current year's national rankings. (There's a least one web site out there that ranks all American high schools from 1 to 16,000 or however many there are now.) It shouldn't take much development time, the people who don't care won't have to do anything, and the people who do care can edit the states that they care about pretty quickly, adding much to the experience. It took me less than 45 minutes to set all of the Georgia high schools and the ones in surrounding states that I cared about to my liking in BBCF, and it makes the game feel much more immersive than the current TCY setup, where in any given gamestart, I may be recruiting from Cross Keys and/or Stewart-Quitman every year--schools that because of their demographics and resources are very unlikely to have a single D1 prospect any time in the next 10 years, and probably never will in my lifetime.

So, in summation, I wouldn't spend any time at all updating the list if you're not going do something to make it more realistic-feeling. The names are already in there, so there's not a compelling reason to delete them. However, the bar has been set higher than it was 7 years ago, when just having them in the game was enough.