Portal Insanity: How to assess Cal's recruiting efforts in a new era
College football's new roster building reality powered every team that made the playoff semi-finals. How can you tell if the Bears are improving?
Do you find the transfer portal confusing and overwhelming? Do you find your head spinning as your e-mail box is bombarded with update after update from this website with player departures and arrivals? Do you find yourself struggling to understand if Cal is succeeding or failing to make their roster better?
Well, good news! I’m here to help!
How has the game changed?
It used to be that following recruiting was pretty simple. All that really mattered was high school recruiting, and the various scouting services (Scout, Rivals, 247, ESPN) all put a lot of work into grading the players in each high school recruiting class, and those rankings were generally very accurate in the aggregate; the better your recruiting rank, the better your chance of getting drafted into the NFL. You could rank every college football team based on the total scouting value of their class, and those rankings were also very predictive in the aggregate. In fact, you could not win a national championship without a certain level of talent as defined by those high school recruiting rankings.
Until, potentially, now. Indiana is one win away from becoming the first team to win a national title without hitting the Blue Chip Ratio threshold, because they have become early masters of portal recruitment and development. The game has changed, drastically.
Before the portal, you could assess an individual high school recruit based on their recruiting rankings on each individual service, or use the 247 composite that averaged out every service’s ranking, and that was pretty much it.
But revenue sharing, NIL, and the portal introduced an entirely new factor that makes judging recruiting much more difficult: money.
Before, the goal was obvious: Get the best players. Now the goal has a critical wrinkle: get the best players for the right price.
For example, On3 has Sam Leavitt ranked as the #1 quarterback who entered the portal, ahead of #2 Drew Mestemaker. Now, maybe you’re the type to crunch tape and you want to quibble with the rankings, but hypothetically if you’re trying to build the very best team, you try to convince Sam Leavitt to join your program.
But what these rankings DON’T tell you is how much money you might have to pay to get one player or another. You’d probably rather have Drew Mestemaker for 3 million dollars if Sam Leavitt is demanding 5 million dollars, because that means that your revenue sharing budget has an extra 2 million dollars to spend on more elite talent.
In short, it is almost impossible to grade individual transfers without a sense of:
How much revenue sharing/NIL money that player receives.
How much revenue sharing/NIL money is available for your entire roster.
Unfortunately, that information mostly doesn’t exist except in certain high profile situations, and when it does exist it’s typically from reporting and not on any kind of formal documentation.
So how can you assess transfer portal recruiting?
Wait for the entire cycle to finish and judge the class as a whole
This is probably a distinctly unsatisfying answer, but it’s true.
To be clear, you can and should get excited when Cal gets a commitment from proven talents like Ian Strong or Chase Hendricks. Securing the (for now) 8th and 12th best portal receivers per On3 is massive.
But like we talked above above, you can’t look at these players in isolation. If a team uses a huge percentage of its budget on a few players, but ends the portal period with a lopsided roster and a bunch of positional gaps, then it’s probably reasonable to conclude that they didn’t maximize their roster well.
And if a team loses more talent than they bring in, it’s probably fair to conclude that they didn’t have the monetary resources to improve the roster, and got raided by programs that are better funded.
It’s still early days and a lot can change, but it’s a good sign that Cal is 23rd in On3’s team rankings, indicating that Cal has added more value to the roster than it has lost, despite 31 departures vs. 15 arrivals (as of Sunday night, when I’m writing this update).
Proven, transferrable production is better than potential . . .
Full transparency: some of this is opinion/preference rather than objective, data-backed fact. For example, which wide receiver would you rather have?
A wide receiver who had 60 catches for 700 yards playing for an FCS playoff team, who has 1 year of eligibility left.
A wide receiver who had 40 catches for 500 yards playing for an above average G5 program who has 2 years of eligibility left.
A former 4 star wide receiver transferring away from an SEC program who received no significant playing time in two seasons, but has three years of eligibility left.
There is no one correct answer, and determining the best player is likely as much or more an exercise in scouting as it is an exercise in statistical analysis.
But on average, I trust players who have actually produced on the field, particularly when it has come against competition on par with ACC play. Is Jacob de Jesus a good target? Well, he was incredibly productive and he torched an ACC defense. Is Ian Strong a good target? Well, he was good enough to get all conference attention in the Big-10 despite having to catch passes in a Rutgers offense.
The bigger the step up in competitive level, the more wary you should be about how much the on-field productivity will translate. But all things being equal, I’d rather have on-field production vs. the potential of a high school recruiting profile that hasn’t yet been realized.
. . . But acknowledge positional scarcity
Finding proven production at certain positions in the portal is incredibly difficult. Consider the On3 rankings at offensive tackle:
The 4th best tackle is Xavier Chaplin, who has one year left. He spent 2025 at Auburn, where he was part of the line that allowed 42 sacks, 129th in the country (yes, I know that Jackson Arnold bears some of the blame for all those sacks, but STILL).
The 9th best tackle is Stanton Ramil, who had a mediocre 2024 season, then got hurt in the 4th game of the season and functionally missed the rest of the year.
The 22nd best tackle is Leon Bell, who spent the 2025 season in a season long battle for playing time at Cal.
You get the idea. I think the top three tackles in On3’s rankings (Jacarrius Peak, Lance Heard, and Wilkin Formby) are all more or less sure things - proven power conference tackles who can be expected to immediately contribute at an above average level. Every single other player in the portal has question marks of some kind or another.
It’s a similar story for edge rushers. On3’s 5th best edge rusher is Darryll Desir, who received rotational back-up snaps at Florida State and didn’t record a single sack. Sure, the guy is a former 4 star recruit with three years of eligibility left, so there’s a reason he’s highly sought after, but he’s not yet a proven commodity.
Why is this? Because teams know exactly how valuable protecting the QB is, and exactly how valuable pressuring the QB is, and so they identify and lock down proven players at OT and edge early. For certain positions, the best way to build is still through high school recruiting and development.
Has your team filled positions of need?
Cal’s roster has many areas where improvement is possible. Frankly, I think Cal could get better at pretty much every position other than quarterback. But it’s also clear that some areas are bigger priorities than others.
For example, on offense Cal is probably in pretty decent shape at interior offensive line. Tyson Ruffins, Sioape Vatikani, and Bastian Swinney are all solid players, and all three have eligibility left and are expected to return.
But Cal was severely lacking in pass catching options after a season of drops, made worse by the graduation of Trond Grizzell. Cal had to ensure that pass catching targets were available for JKS. So Cal ensured that they kept Mason Mini, then secured the services of Chase Hendricks, Dorian Thomas, and Ian Strong. All three have proven production and rank towards the top at their respective position.
Cal also really needed to add at tackle, which was a problem position all year long BEFORE Cal lost most of their contributing tackles to the portal. Will Jimothy Lewis, Jacob Arop, and Mykeal Rabess be solutions at the position? For the reasons I described above, none of the three are sure things. But Cal has still done what they can to address a position of need.
Is Cal’s work done? Hardly. Cal made a good start in the secondary by keeping Isaiah Crosby and Cam Sidney, but the Bears lost two excellent cornerbacks who ran out of eligibility, and the Bears need to figure out how to replace Brent Austin and Hezekiah Masses. Maybe Tosh and his team think that there are solutions on the roster, but I’d wager that Cal will add some options at edge cornerback eventually.
There’s also work to be done at linebacker, where Cal has likely lost lots of the depth chart, and along the interior of the defensive line where Aidan Keanaaina, T.J. Bollers, and Stanley Saole-McKenzie are all out of eligibility.
Write For California will keep you up to date on Cal’s progress in the portal, but it’s still very early. Heck, players still have until January 16th to enter the portal. Players are under no obligation to the to commit by a certain date, though most will want to do so sooner rather than later so that they can guarantee a roster spot and get registered at their new school in time for spring camp.