College football success doesn’t always translate to NFL success. But when a player succeeds at a powerhouse school, chances are they’ll have a fruitful career in the pros. Of course, hundreds of colleges have produced football players at the highest level. In fact, 428 different schools have been represented on the first 56 Super Bowl rosters; however, many schools have churned out Super Bowl contenders that have risen to levels higher than the rest.
JustWatch ranked the 15 most common colleges of players on the rosters of Super Bowl teams throughout NFL history using data from Pro-Football-Reference.com. Colleges are ranked based on their total number of appearances on rosters. The data set also includes the unique number of players from each college in Super Bowl history and each college’s former players who made Super Bowl rosters most frequently. Rosters from Pro-Football-Reference.com are season-long and do not necessarily represent the active rosters from the day of the Super Bowl.
To show the dominance of the schools on this list, 13 of the colleges had at least one player on either the Los Angeles Rams or Cincinnati Bengals’ rosters during Super Bowl LVI, and all 15 had at least one player on a Super Bowl roster during the first two editions.
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Recent Super Bowl rosters have included a wider array of schools
Although the 15 schools on this list were the most common alma maters seen in Super Bowl rosters, dozens of schools have been represented in the big game—especially in recent years. As the graph above shows, 2015’s Super Bowl XLIX between the Seattle Seahawks and New England Patriots featured players from 92 different colleges, a non-strike year record. (The 1987 strike season, where the owners hired replacement players, had a total of 124 different colleges represented in the Super Bowl.)
Interestingly enough, despite the 1987 season and ’90s showing an increase in school representation,…
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