Mike Farrell Sports

College Football Recruiting, Opinion, and Analysis

Coach Prime Is Right About the Portal

Director of Scouting Steven Bailoni breaks down why Coach Prime is taking the right approach to recruiting

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Apr 22
Apr 22

By: Steven Bailoni

My colleagues have had a lot to say about Coach Prime. How his tenure started and his teambuilding plan all have brought him lots of flak from this site and many others across the board. Here’s the thing- I don’t really think Deion is doing anything wrong.

There’s this prevalent idea that using the portal as the primary venue for team building will doom you. That’s not based on reality; we simply don’t have the data on what Deion is doing outside of a few teams that started at the same time as him. Texas State had nearly the same roster overhaul and just got to play in the program’s first-ever bowl game (and won). SMU, while not having nearly as much turnover as Colorado, also hit the portal hard which fueled a conference-winning run. Ole Miss has been hitting the portal hard every year; it hasn’t come all in one season so they’ve had better optics and the roster work culminated in a NY6 Bowl-winning season. Colorado seems to be the outlier here, but they played in a relatively strong Pac-12 conference with a roster that only had 1 win the year before.

Sep 30, 2023; Boulder, Colorado, USA; Colorado Buffaloes head coach Deion Sanders walks off the field before the game against the USC Trojans at Folsom Field.

Deion has said before he’s got a 40-40-20 plan: 40% grad/upperclassmen transfers, 40% young/underclassmen transfers, and 20% high school recruits. You know what strikes me about this? He’s got an actual plan and targets in place, something plenty of FBS teams can’t say. Lane Kiffin gave a great response to our very own Kyle Golik about using the portal with a plan as a foundation to start winning and even mentioned how they’re in a class of about 10% of FBS teams. Teams have reactionary portal plans stemming from how many scholarship slots they have left to apply band-aid fixes to holes in the roster. They do not have plans set in place to help guide the roster to where it needs to go. Everyone is whining about their players entering the transfer portal and instead of crying Deion has chosen to control the chaos. It’s not even like his high school recruits are random 3 stars for depth either- he’s picked up #1 ranked OT Jordan Seaton and 3 other 4 stars in the 2024 class. It’s arguably a benefit for him when he gets to say “we’re only taking 10 or so kids and we want you to be one of them” rather than the dozens of other coaches preaching that their team is a family, only to come to the same players two years later and ask them to enter the portal so they can use their scholarship on someone else. He’s operating how CFB has been the last two years, he just has the decency to not lie about it. The 40% dedication to young transfers even shows this isn’t about hiring a bunch of 1-year rentals. 3 years of development from a transfer player isn’t that far off from 4 for a high school player. He’s just giving kids who realized they committed to the wrong school earlier a chance to come be developed by his staff instead.

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I’ve seen plenty of fans complain as well that recruiting rankings mean nothing and you need to look at the quality of rosters without considering the number of blue-chip prospects. So why aren’t we letting Deion do that? You don’t get it both ways and Deion’s strategy is taking advantage of the errors of recruiting services that don’t have time to fully scout every player in the country. It removes the gamble from project players and lets you see how they’ve developed even after a year of college training. It’s a safer bet and pulls the projections out of the equation to give you a more accurate understanding of the players. I’d argue he’s removing some uncertainty in scouting the players and allowing his staff more time to ensure players are culture fits, even if they don’t immediately mesh.

We’ve created this false narrative that College Football is really about education (even Colorado’s AD felt the need to chime in). It’s not. We can lie to ourselves as much as we want, but it won’t make it true, it won’t make P5 players care, and it won’t make CFB any less of a defacto NFL development league. Kids aren’t committing to Ohio State because of their academic standing, they’re committing because they’re getting a couple thousand a year, have a shot at a championship and they like Brian Hartline (or any other coach there). Schools have to have their interns run around to every player’s class and have them sign in just to get them to show up to class, are people sincerely going to argue that kids are going to these colleges to get an education? I’ve seen enough players skipping meetings with academic advisors, falling asleep in classes, and asking what the easiest majors on campus are to know they just don’t care. Their education works as a de facto term of employment, not a benefit of the job. If any of this was actually about education, players wouldn’t enter the transfer portal at all if they were asked to leave the team. Power 5 schools fully guarantee academic scholarships cannot be taken away for athletics reasons. If players were at the schools for their degrees, they’d ride out the scholarship as a backup and never enter the portal. Too bad it’s not about their education and has never been; these players are here to play football.

Nov 11, 2023; Boulder, Colorado, USA; Colorado Buffaloes quarterback Shedeur Sanders (2) celebrates his touchdown with head coach Deion Sanders in the first half against the Arizona Wildcats at Folsom Field.

This ties right into the “they’re just kids, he shouldn’t have asked them to leave the program” complaint from when he took over as well. This is a two-way street. They’re not regular kids, they’re getting a full-ride scholarship with room and board plus a few thousand from their school’s NIL collectives (or more). They get a few more perks than the hundreds of thousands of other degree-seeking students. If you want to be treated like a regular adult employee with the perks of making money, leaving whenever you want, and added benefits, then you have to deal with the other side of being an adult which is getting fired from your job sometimes. You don’t get to reap all the benefits because you can run fast with a football in your hands. They’re making decisions like an adult finding a job so they have to deal with the consequences of their decisions as an adult would.

Deion improved a 1-11 team to 4-8. I don’t care what you think of the season, that’s a noticeable improvement and he did it by using the portal in a massive roster overhaul. We don’t have any long-term examples of his recruiting strategy and he’s already starting to show improvement in Boulder. He’s got a clear plan forward and is embracing the reality of CFB as we know it today. I think his faults going forward will lie with the team’s overall coaching, not his approach to recruiting. It might rub some people the wrong way, but his job is to win as a coach in a league that forces you to adapt or die. He simply chose to adapt.

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