Discover which college football teams master the transfer portal for championship contention and uncover the winning strategies for roster building.
It's a new era of college football, and a strong argument could be made that the transfer portal is now a necessary tool for success. Each team has to utilize for the portal for one reason or another. For teams like Notre Dame, Ohio State, Georgia and Texas, the portal is used for supplementation. Head coach Marcus Freeman has gone on record stating their strategy is to 'major in high school recruiting and minor in the portal'.
For other schools, the portal is used to lay the foundations of a roster. In today's show, we broke down which schools in the Big Ten, SEC, ACC and Big 12 had the best recruiting classes. Then, we dove into which schools have the most sustainable strategy and which schools need to switch up their tactics.
You can watch the entire show here:
Here are some of the main topics we discussed on today's show:
On Notre Dame's portal class...
"Did Notre Dame bring in more guys than they lost? No. Did they lose starters? They lost one, but they replaced one. Did you replace them with guys that were going to play key roles. When you look at Notre Dame's class, they picked up six to eight guys. We said they needed at least one receiver and they got two. We said they needed at least one defensive tackle and they went out and got two. Is there impact talent? Yes. Did you get good depth players or good starters? They got both."
On The Difficulties Of Evaluating SEC's Portal Sessions...
"It makes it challenging to evaluate how good some of these portal sessions are for SEC teams because you have so many players transferring from SEC school to SEC school. When you transfer from a G5 school to a P4 school, it's fair to raise the concern about it working out for you at the next level. But with the SEC, if it didn't work out for you at Auburn, why is it now going to work out at Arkansas? If it didn't work out for you at Texas, why is it now going to work out for you at Ole Miss? That makes it extremely difficult to evaluate."
On Which Teams Need To Be Portal Heavy...
"Mainly the blue bloods of the sport. With a school like Indiana, even though they're fresh off of a National Championship, they'll never be able to recruit at the high school level like a Notre Dame or an Ohio State. They have to remain competitive in that space, but they won't ever reach that level. It's about finding a balance between the two. You can't completely ignore the transfer portal like Clemson has done. But you also can't live and die strictly from portal acquisitions like Florida State or LSU have. It's about finding the correct blend of high school recruiting and talent portal usage."
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