The adage that there is more than one way to skin a cat never applied to roster building in college football.

For 100 years, the formula was simple: Recruit high school players and develop them for a couple of years behind the scenes before unleashing them as upperclassmen. That meant Year 4 for a coach was a pivotal season because the roster was finally his. 

That’s no longer true because of the transfer portal. Fan bases no longer wait until Year 4 to pass judgment and programs are no longer beholden to old-school roster building. Maybe there are more ways than one to build a championship level roster? 

Two programs in the Big 12 – TCU and Texas Tech – are trying to prove that one is better than the other. Sonny Dykes and Joey McGuire are both entering their fourth seasons as head coach at TCU and Texas Tech, respectively, and the two rival programs are taking drastically different paths to roster building heading into 2025.

The Red Raiders splashed in the transfer portal, signing the nation’s top class, which included 21 players. TCU is betting on in-house development with only 12 incoming transfers. The opposite was true for the two coaches heading into Year 3 as the Horned Frogs signed 24 transfers and the Red Raiders landed 16 heading into 2024. Over the last two cycles, TCU has signed 36 transfers while Tech is at 37. 

The number of transfers doesn’t tell the full story. Of those 12 incoming transfers for the Horned Frogs, only a handful are expected to start. The others are multiple-year transfers who can become immediate depth and future contributors. The Red Raiders pushed their chips all-in and are counting on 11-13 of those new transfers to start in Week 1. That’s over half of the projected starters. 

Texas Tech’s entire defensive line was revamped through the portal and all four starters in Week 1 will likely be transfers. The Red Raiders spent over $10 million in the portal on the likes of defensive tackles Lee Hunter (UCF), Skyler Gill-Howard (NIU), and Anthony Holmes (Houston), as well as defensive ends David Bailey (Stanford) and Romello Height (Georgia Tech). Three of the five starting offensive linemen could also be transfers, as is the potential starter at running back, tight end, cornerback, and at least one of the safeties. 

Ten of the 21 incoming transfers for Texas Tech are arriving from other Power Four programs. The Red Raiders raided the likes of Stanford, USC and North Carolina for starters. Some of them are Texans heading back to the Lone Star State, sure, but this isn’t a case of finding G5 diamonds in the rough. This was a clear statement of intent – Texas Tech is ready to roster build with the big boys and if the Red Raiders can’t sign that type of talent out of high school, they’ll go get it in the portal. 

TCU did not take that approach. The Horned Frogs did go grab a pair of starters at wide receiver in Jospeh Manjack IV and Jordan Dwyer. Defensive tackle Ansel Din-Mbuh and cornerback Elijah Jackson could start in Week 1 on the defensive side of the ball. Six of the 12 incoming transfers arrived from other P4 schools. The biggest money the Horned Frogs spent this offseason was keeping the roster intact and staving off the likes of Tennessee for quarterback Josh Hoover. 

The roster wasn’t the only divergence between the two programs. Texas Tech also hired two new coordinators. Mack Leftwich arrived from Texas State to call the offense after former OC Zach Kittley became the head coach at FAU. Shiel Wood was hired away from Houston to replace Tim DeRuyter as defensive coordinator. The Horned Frogs are returning OC Kendal Briles for Year 3 and Andy Avalos as DC for Year 2. 

The recent history of program building suggests that the transfer portal model Texas Tech is following is volatile. The boom-or-bust factor is greater for teams pieced together through the portal. Like Alexander the Great learned when his armies first saw war elephants in Asia, mercenaries tend to disband and leave the fight at the first sign of adversity. Florida State is the best example. The boom was 2023 when the Seminoles went undefeated in the regular season and were cheated out of playoff spot. The bust occurred last year when Florida State went 2-10. 

National championship teams like Michigan and Ohio State have shown that the best way to build a roster remains closer to the old-school model. The best comparison is probably in the way that the NFL does it – use the draft (recruiting) to build the bulk of your roster while supplementing holes through free agency (transfer portal). 

But unlike the NFL, every team in college football can’t operate in the same way. Texas can recruit blue chips on a yearly basis. A program like Texas Tech might only get these types of impact players through the portal. 

TCU signed the top-rated high school class in the Big 12 during the 2025 cycle. Ironic because Dykes was using transfers for his benefit before it was cool. He brought Nick Foles to Arizona and rebuilt SMU into a 10-win squad for the first time since the Death Penalty by bringing DFW natives back home through the portal. But at TCU, he’s going the other way and feels like the market is oversaturated in the portal. Why overpay for instant impact players from other schools when you can grow them in-house?

An argument can be made that a heavy reliance on the portal heading into Year 4 is a bad sign in terms of recruiting and developing. The counter argument is that Texas Tech suddenly has the resources to recruit in a way the Red Raiders couldn’t previously. McGuire doesn’t want to be portal heavy every cycle. But there is an opening before revenue-sharing takes effect and having super boosters like Cody Campbell who are willing and able to sign the best players available for a 2025 run to the CFP is a wildcard that not every program has. 

The 2025 season will go a long way to prove or disprove the current realities of roster building in college football. If Texas Tech hits and wins the Big 12 en route to a CFP berth, no one will care that the roster was bought in the offseason. But if a program like TCU, which won six of its last seven last year, finishes ahead of the Red Raiders, that might be another cautionary tale against portal reliance.