The 2025 college football season will go down in history as the year that broke the old-school method of team building.

Four of the top five transfer portal classes heading into 2025 were signed by Texas Tech, Ole Miss, Oregon, and Miami. Each of those programs reached at least the quarterfinals of the College Football Playoff and are a combined 7-3 so far in the tournament with Miami still alive. Oregon was the only one of the four to sign a Top 10 recruiting class in 2025. Miami signed the 14th best class, Ole Miss landed at 19, and Tech checked in at 43. Indiana, the overwhelming favorite to win the championship, landed the 53rd best recruiting class but the 13th-ranked portal class in 2025. 

Of the 10 Power Four teams that reached the CFP this year, seven signed portal classes that rank inside the top 16 heading into the season. Those seven teams are a combined 9-4 in this year’s CFP. The three P4 teams in the tournament that didn’t sign Top 16 portal classes were Georgia (29), Oklahoma (51), and Alabama (61). Those three teams went 1-3 in the CFP with the lone win coming when Alabama beat Oklahoma. 

Proof that the 2025 season was a fulcrum moment in college football roster construction comes from the Forty Acres where Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian is clearly changing philosophies. Programs like Texas, which can recruit Top 5 classes out of high school, used the portal as supplemental for most of the last few seasons, just like Georgia, Alabama, Ohio State, and other recruiting giants. 

The belief was that the ceiling was higher for programs who recruited organically. Sign a bunch of five- and four-star prospects with huge upsides, develop those guys behind the scenes, hoard talent at every position, and then dominate peers that didn’t have access to that type of pure talent. That worked for decades and it's why the SEC dominated the sport in the 21st Century. 

But that model is broken and outdated. Money and the ability to move schools spread the talent out and the SEC is reeling. For the third year in a row, the conference won’t have a team in the national championship game. It isn’t a coincidence that this is happening parallel to new dynamics. Before the transfer portal, location to high school talent was paramount and that talent was largely concentrated in the Southeast of the United States. 

It was easier for Alabama and Georgia and Texas to convince that talent to stay at home when there weren’t big paydays to be made in the Midwest or on the West Coast. Furthermore, once that talent was signed and on campus, it was a headache to leave. To cash in as a college football player was to be developed into an NFL prospect, and that happened more often at the blueblood programs with the giant staffs and elite facilities. Not anymore. Why would a four- or five-star recruit wait his turn at a program like Texas or Alabama if they can go make more money to start earlier at a stereotypically mid-tier SEC or Big Ten program? 

Sarkisian sees the trend and is adjusting. The goal is no longer to hoard young talent. The new goal is to spend money on the two-deep. Signing five-star prospects out of high school is still expensive, so why waste your money on bench players who may or may not develop into their potential? The goal is to win now and spending half of your payroll on players in the bottom-half of the roster no longer makes sense. Load that salary into the stars and the starters and worry about replacing that depth the next time the portal opens. 

Texas has watched 23 players leave in the portal. Some saw a mass exodus that caused alarms. Others saw a new process for the Horns. Sarkisian was essentially clearing cap space by allowing non-starters with hefty price tags to find greener pastures while using that freed up money to land portal stars that can help Texas win in 2026 like wide receiver Cam Coleman, linebacker Rasheem Biles, and running back Hollywood Smothers. 

That’s not to say Texas won’t keep recruiting at an elite level. There are still positions, most notably the offensive line, that require development and patience. The Longhorns signed 23 players to the 10th-ranked recruiting class back in December. The difference is the patience in watching those guys develop. If they’re not competing for starting spots after their first year on campus, move on and find a junior or senior who can walk in right away and help you win. 

Bud Elliott created the Blue-Chip Ratio in 2013. It calculates how populated each roster is with four- and five-star talents. The rationale was simple and true: To win a national championship, college football teams need to sign more four- and five-star recruits than two- and three-star players over the previous four recruiting classes. 

That hypothesis held true for every modern college football champion. If fewer than 50 percent of the roster was compiled by non-blue-chips, your team couldn’t win the title. The closest teams to breaking the pattern were Michigan in 2023 with 54 percent blue-chips, 2016 Clemson with 52 percent, and 2013 Florida State with 53 percent. Last year’s Ohio State team was at 90 percent blue-chips. 

Indiana could obliterate that model with a win over Miami. The Hurricanes are at 55 percent on the Blue-Chip Ratio, but the Hoosiers are at eight percent, which is below teams like Stanford and SMU. High school recruiting still matters and provides a higher floor, but it no longer can predict the ceiling. That ceiling is now directly impacted by the transfer portal and how effective each program is at using it to build the top-end of its roster for the upcoming season. 

The early adopters of the transfer portal were rewarded in 2025. Miami, Oregon, Ole Miss, and Texas Tech used it to bridge gaps and fill voids while the bluebloods around them stubbornly held onto the old way of thinking. But those bluebloods are now waking up to the reality. It’ll be interesting to see if that helps recreate the caste system that existed for so long in college football or if that toothpaste can’t be put back into the bottle.