And the big winner on football National Letter of Intent day here Wednesday was…

The airlines.

In-bound, the University of Hawaii got all 23 of its recruits from beyond these shores, some from way beyond: Montreal, Canada, Virginia, Arkansas and American Samoa.

Out-bound, more than 20 Hawaii high school seniors with Division I scholarships, an alarming number, are headed away, some to as far as Nashville, Tenn. (Vanderbilt), South Bend, Ind. (Notre Dame), and Atlanta (Georgia Tech).

Now, Hawaii — in both keeping players home and importing them from the mainland — has predictably been the exception in a string of studies over the years that have shown that most Division I football recruits tend to stick fairly close to their homes. But this year the long-distance traffic is the most pronounced in decades, if not ever.

A study of more than 13,000 players before the 2016 season by Jake Sharpless on the Rukkus ticket website said the average Football Bowl Subdivision player attended a school less than 500 miles from home. Players in the Southeastern Conference (337 miles) and Big Ten (424 miles) stuck even closer to the homestead while Pac-12 players came from much farther (836 miles) afield.

Location, as they say, is everything. According to the study, UH’s polar opposite, the “other” UH — the University of Houston — smack dab in the recruit-rich Lone Star State, got its players from an average of less than 200 miles from campus, compared to Manoa’s 1,811 miles. And now that is going up.

It wasn’t as if UH didn’t have its fishing lines out in abundance here this time. In fact it is hard to imagine a UH coach who has made a more of a determined appeal in sound bites and across social media aimed at keeping local products home than Nick Rolovich. He laid out the welcome mat as soon as he bounded off the plane for his first 2015 press conference.

Indeed, 14 of the of the Top 15 players on the Honolulu Star-Advertiser’s list of leading college football prospects in the state this go-around said they were offered scholarships to Manoa.

But perhaps never before have UH recruiters encountered such a crush of competition in their backyard or have so many local prospects had a wider, richer smorgasbord from which to choose.

Forty schools in addition to UH — nearly 30 percent of all schools playing on the FBS level — extended one or more offers here. Ten schools each from the Pac-12 and Mountain West conferences (where were you Wyoming and New Mexico?) were waving around scholarships as well as eight from the SEC and every independent.

Included among them were some of the most expensive schools in the country and institutions many with well-appointed facilities, more prestigious conferences and some with decades of tradition.

Former UH coach Norm Chow used to lament that Hawaii had become an “over-fished” recruiting ground. And this year has taken it up another notch with 10 of the leading players from Hawaii having entertained eight or more offers while 12 had at least six, according to the hawaiiprepworld.com recruiting page.

But by the time it came to put signature to paper Wednesday morning, the first day that binding scholarship commitments could be made, UH was unable to reel in any of them on the home front, a first in more than 20 years. Hence an added impetus to take the ’Bows’ search far and wide.

The rule of thumb is that it takes three years to determine how successful a recruiting class is.

Until then, the one thing that is assured is that the airlines really hit the jackpot.

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.