The transfer portal era has exposed clear flaws in the talent evaluation system used for high school players by major college football programs.
All over the country, players who were under-evaluated in high school are getting chances to move up to power programs, while their peers who were over-evaluated are facing a harsh reality of having to go down a level.
Now, I get it. Whiffing on evaluations is nothing new, and it certainly isn’t specific to college football. Misjudgements happen all the time in all sports.
I mean, remember when the Cleveland Cavaliers drafted Anthony Bennett first overall in 2013?
Nonetheless, the current college football climate creates an environment in which players have a chance to make up for a lack of high school exposure once they get to college. Transversely, high-level prospects can fall off the radar. It’s almost as if the first year or two of a player’s college career are a weird middle ground between high school and high-level college ball. You don’t necessarily have that set-up in any other sport.
There are several specific cases of this that caught my eye this offseason, so let’s dive into them.
Players who are clearly not as good as we thought they were in high school
- Malachi Nelson
I know ESPN’s recruiting rankings are pretty unreliable, but the Worldwide Leader had Nelson ranked as the number one overall prospect in the entire Class of 2023. It’s clear that Lincoln Riley got him on campus, saw how good (or bad) he actually was, and quickly wanted nothing to do with him. As it turned out, the rest of the country saw it the same way; he couldn’t get a Power Four offer in the portal and has ended up at Boise State. Clear miss on everyone’s part.
- Korey Foreman
This one might be even worse than Nelson. I know I might be picking on USC, but Foreman was the consensus number one prospect in 2021. After playing in eight games as a freshman, he appeared in 12 as a sophomore but only recorded 16 tackles, and only one (!) for a loss. His junior season, he was effectively benched after three games, redshirted, and transferred to Fresno State. An egregious miss.
Players who were grossly underestimated in high school
- Joey Slackman
A zero-star prospect out of high school, Slackman went on to wreak all kinds of havoc in the Ivy League at Penn before becoming one of this offseason’s most prized transfers. He’ll go to Florida and have a chance to make a big name for himself in the SEC. How did the evaluators miss this one?
- Cam Ward
This one really mystifies me. Everyone knows Ward now; he was arguably the most sought-after quarterback in the portal this offseason and elected Miami over Ohio State and others. However, Ward is one of this decade’s craziest evaluation misses. Originally from West Columbia, TX, south of Houston, Ward didn’t get a single FBS offer out of high school and ended up at Incarnate Word. He only got the opportunity at Washington State because his head coach at UIW became the OC/QB coach in Pullman. How did every major program in Texas and the SEC, along with other FBS programs in the area, miss on this guy?
- Trey Moore
Moore went from relative obscurity in the recruiting scene to the arguable crown jewel of Texas’s top-tier transfer class. Another zero star from Texas, Moore stayed close to home to go to UTSA. He developed into the 2023 AAC Defensive Player of the Year. He’s even good enough that Texas likely tampered to get him into the portal so they could poach him away. Without the transfer portal, Moore likely goes on to sell insurance, all because evaluators missed him. And it’s not like Moore was at a nowhere high school, either. Smithson Valley is a legit program.
You see, evaluators miss ALL THE TIME. The list of failures is endless, but here are a few more bad recruiting beats:
Johnny Manziel famously wanted nothing more than to play at Texas, but the Longhorns didn’t offer him a scholarship.
Trenton Thompson was the consensus number one prospect in the Class of 2015. WHO!?
Google Tate Martell’s college career if you want a good laugh.
If you want to go back a little, Bo Jackson, a lifelong Alabama fan, was told by Tide coaches that he wasn’t good enough to start for them. He went to Auburn intentionally to spite them and prove them wrong.
Robert Griffin III wasn’t offered as a quarterback by the vast majority of schools that recruited him, including Texas and LSU.
It seems like each program and major media outlet has tens of people that think they “know” how a prospect is going to play out. But they don’t. Nobody really “knows.” It’s what makes the transfer portal so important. It’s a self-corrective mechanism designed to account for awfully inaccurate high school evaluations.
It’s easy to know whether a player is actually good once they get on a college campus, but until then, it’s politics, flashy showcases, hype tapes, and body measurements. That’s all high school recruiting is. There’s a reason programs like Washington and Florida State became nationally relevant overnight, and it’s certainly not thanks to high school recruiting rankings.
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