Yeah, there's a lot of talented players and recruits, many of whom fly under the radar to start.

The major disagreement is with the bar you used of 86+ being great recruits - think it's higher, especially with inflation.

That puts about 650 recruits each year as top-tier. Or 10 per team with 65 teams. Which is repeatable over 4 years to give 40 per team, slightly less than the offensive/defensive 2-deep. Especially when you also consider that 65+ of those will be gone as early draft entrants. Plus, you can go deeper than 2 deep. Teams use multiple RBs for example. And Georgia having Carson Beck and Brock Vandagriff didn't prevent Gunner Stockton from committing there. So that's

You may ask "what about a Tyler Allgeier or a Brady Christensen, all the guys who aren't highly recruited but end up being NFL worthy?" But the answer to that is "What about Sam Huard?" He was a top rated QB and ended up at Cal Poly after transferring down.

The extreme openness of the transfer portal allows the top 65 teams to have the supposed best 3000 college players at any given time (46 per team). And as it turns out that some of those players aren't the actual best and some others are, those will (largely, albeit not entirely) swap out.

Interestingly I think this gives BYU an advantage if we end up in this second-tier league, because players at BYU are less likely to view BYU as a stepping stone minor league type University