...but I do agree with kimdaddy that the portal should ALWAYS be a positive for any P5 (or P4 now) team

BYU Top 5 Portal additions/losses for 2023 (per 247 transfer rating)

That's pretty close to a net neutral at the top.  Heckard = Jeudy-Lally, Taggart = Fano, Etienne = Ca Barrington.  Robbins and Slovis basically wash with Cl Barrington and Pili (all of those 4 dealt with injuries and underperformed their ratings)

But where we benefitted from the portal was mostly with useful (or even starting) depth, not the top of the roster studs.  We gained Paul Maile (88, 1 yr), AJ Vongphachanh (88, 1 yr), Jackson Cravens (87, 1 yr), Isaiah Bagnah (86, 2 yrs), Darius Lassiter (86, 2 yrs), Weylin Lapuaho (85, 4 yrs), Kamden Garrett (85, 1 yr) while only losing guys like Conover (86, 2 yrs, but clearly not in the plans), Tate Romney (85, 3 yrs), Dallin Holker (no transfer rating due to timeline, 2 years that became 1 when he played himself into a draft pick).

Yes, Holker vastly outperformed where he was rated... but so did Kamden Garrett.  For all the debate about Fano (and let's concede he's a loss and we'd love to have him back, he was electric and there's certainly star potential there), I think it's really hard to argue we overall lost in the portal.  Doesn't matter if you focus on presumed value at the time or actual performance, it comes out either way as a small net win.

Ideally, we'd certainly like it to be more, and certainly (comparing this to what Utah as example has done in the portal), we could and should do more at the top.  And it won't always be as easy to fill in lower-end gaps (when we have fewer), but this isn't a bad portal take.  Npt as good as past years (see Puka and Kingsley) so I get the disappointment, but by any objective analysis, it was a net positive