The State of Recruiting (Everywhere, not just UF)

Reposted from the Insider board by request:

Had an interesting discussion with a guy who is an assistant at a major college program (although not necessarily a good program) last week - we spent a lot of time talking about recruiting and the state of NIL. Here were his opinions:

First, to a certain extent there has been a reset in recruiting. He said for a couple of years players were definitely looking to get the most money, because there was no set market and the offers were widely divergent between schools. So one school might offer a kid 50k and another one might offer a kid 500k. However, now that it's been going on for a while there is an unofficial but pretty well established range that every school has somebody tracking. To that end, the offers to kids don't end up being all that far apart. The source of the money has changed from NIL to RevShare (or proposed RevShare) but the amounts really have normalized. Which leads to the next point:

2. The biggest concern for most kids is not money, but how they will get to the NFL. This was previously the biggest issue and even through the NIL era was a major factor obviously. Not a single college football player at major program sees themselves going anywhere but the NFL, even though a minuscule percentage of them actually make it. And of course that's what schools sell. According to this guy the biggest things to recruits are NFL first, and then probably a tie between culture, playing time, and money. Every kid who plays football has dealt with a coach who wouldn't play them for political reasons or gave a lesser player more time than they should have, so players are trying to avoid those situations and get paid. He said that kids who are at a position that typically needs development are looking for guarantees that they won't get recruited over out of the portal. Which leads to my next point:

3. The transfer portal reigns supreme. This guy told me that he is basically unconcerned with taking a high school player over a portal player at the same position. Portal players are a known quantity, even coming from smaller programs or FCS schools. According to this guy it is much easier to project how a kid will do when you have actual college tape, no matter what the level of college, because in his words "even the little schools play against major programs at least once or twice a year." This guy went so far as to say that his particular school has already shifted almost all of their scouting and recruiting to portal players. Part of it might be that this school is not going to compete for top 100 players except for once in a blue moon, but the era of trying to find diamonds in the rough with high school players is over. Right now, according to this coach, a portal player with good tape has a much much better chance of getting a place with a major program than a high school kid, unless that high school kid is just an absolute stud. He also pointed out something that we all know, which is that it is getting increasingly harder for merely good high school players to even get a look from a major program. I asked him if this was a function of his particular school, given that they aren't usually in the running for top top players, and he said that his school does have a reputation (although it's getting a little stale) for putting guys at certain positions into the NFL so they get traction with good players at those positions. But he also said that he has friends all over college football and as far as he knows every school is following the same strategy. He said of course certain schools will take a stud out of high school if they can get him, but he said he expects for high school recruiting to become less and less important every year unless some sort of transfer restriction is put into place. He said high school players are going to become secondary to portal players except at the highest highest levels.

EDIT: forgot to mention he said that his school will never take a non-portal QB again, at least not with the intention of making that guy their primary quarterback. Said historically there's just been too many misses on guys (not at his school, everywhere) and that a kid starting and being successful at QB at almost any level in college is better than a kid starting at a top program in high school. He said they're even reluctant to take high school kids for development, because the assumption is those kids will just leave to go start somewhere else. I mentioned that didn't leave a lot of room for QBs and he said if you are not a top 20 QB your best bet is probably to go to a smaller program, preferably a directional school or an FCS program, and ball out there, then transfer to a bigger school. He said starting minutes on film, in college, are worth way more than anything else.

4. Revenue sharing is still completely up in the air. No one wants to overpay, and no one wants to underpay so basically the promise is either a number subject to revision or that revenue sharing will be competitive with other schools in the same conference. I had heard of this in other sports but was surprised that football players were willing to accept that, but apparently programs can give them a general range. They are making sure that the range matches whatever the going rate is for a particular player at a particular position, but a lot of times these rates are subject to change based on what the revenue share actually turns out to be. He said because TV money and other money is relatively predictable, and because the percentage of distribution between sports is well known internally , the only real unknown is how they are going to distribute the money throughout the team. I asked who that was up to and he said at his school it's a collaborative thing but at other schools it's just the head coach making those decisions or position coaches get a proposed allotment and then it's up to them to decide how to split it up. The point here is that there might be a lot of promises being made to players that may not be able to be kept as things go forward. This is important because of the next point:

5. Compliance departments are telling schools to take the House Settlement seriously, especially the part about NIL. There's still a lot up in the air about the House Settlement but schools are basically treating it as if it or some version of it will become the law of the land, and the major impact here is that NIL deals need to be real deals at market rates. According to this guy schools are largely removing themselves from getting NIL deals from anyone other than major commercial sponsors which they can spread among multiple players. They will have internal NIL people who work with external NIL people to get star players deals, but they are trying to be less involved in that because it is less of a pipeline for money, and private NIL deals with individual boosters that don't match market value are expected to be highly scrutinized. Schools are concentrating on RevShare not NIL. Based on these comments I asked about a favorite of mine, the return of the bag man, which leads to the next point

6. The bag man is back baby! Actually they never left but they became less important for the couple of years when you could just give a player a bunch of money and call it NIL. I specifically asked him if the contraction of NIL would lead to more under the table money like in the past and he just said that there will always be people trying to get money to players to exert influence, and players and their families will always be happy to take their money. Still he said in recruiting the agents have taken over the position of the shady " advisors " although as far as he can tell they're the same people. But when I commented that the system as it is changing would probably lead to a resurgence in under the table money, he agreed with me. Of course he said he doesn't know about how much kids are getting from other people, but also said it isn't the school's business to know that (caveat: in my experience the successful football schools know exactly what players are getting, but I didn't say that to him)

Anyway I thought you all might find this interesting. Based on this guy's comments it seems like our next coach better be a portal God as opposed to a recruiting god