... mini-viral (~250K interacitons) as I fleshed out Indy's idea with some of the quiks/biases in recruiting rankings.

After lots of further comments/thoughts/conversations over the past 2 days, I feel that there's a much stronger case for the recruiting services propping up the rankings of the biggest brands than there is for a purposeful downgrading of BYU or other specific non-blue-blood programs... That schools like BYU are just collaterally damaged in an effort to make things look better for the B1G/SEC schools.

First off, it is totally reasonable to "re-grade" players in the transfer portal. The fact that the grading systems don't really match up well with the HS grading system is definitely a shortcoming (it is harder to get a 95 as a transfer than it is as a HS recruit for some reason). It does seem weird though that Texas & Michigan were getting the benefit of 95/96-rated recruits in "team talent composites" and in some predictive metric systems if they would have stayed at their schools, regardless of production.

The case for Gentry's "downgrade" is actually a more eye-brow-raising example of this than Akana to me. Gentry, as a red-shirt sophmore at one of the best OL-talent programs in the nation (5 O-linemen taken in the last 2 NFL Drafts, NC squade, Remington Award winner, etc...) worked his way into the starting line-up (they benched Link to make way for Gentry to start). Gentry got injured after just 2 starts, but graded out well in those games. So what's the logic of having him down at an 86? Good enough to start at Michigan, and Michigan gets credit for a 96 talent while he's there, but with an 86 re-grade, Michigan looks to be "shedding some dead weight" and will almost assuredly be able to bring in someone who is higher graded than a 86.

Here's looking at BYU's 3 transfers in and comparoing them to 3 of BYU's transfer's out.

https://twitter.com/jjfuller72/status/1872104270801117364

Here's another possible milder example of that with Carsen Ryan... rated a 89 out of high school, 2 years at UCLA where he played 2 years and had decent production the 2nd year, Enters transfer portal and is re-graded (down) to 86 then ends up at Utah, statistically does slightly worse at Utah than at UCLA and then decideds to enter the transfer portal again and is popped back up to an 89. Again, UCLA gets to "get rid of" a 86 and will likely bring in a higher rated guy and therefore have a higher-rated transfer class

https://twitter.com/jjfuller72/status/1872115250947842056

Thoughts CB?