We human beings are funny creatures sometimes. Our brains have a way of clocking our personal preferences as normal and everyone else's as clear proof of insanity.
Example: ever gotten in a shower after someone else to discover their preferred temperature is five degrees cooler or hotter than yours? How could they? Or how about selecting a cruising speed on the highway. Everyone who drives 10 miles per hour faster than you is a mad man who's going to get us all killed. Coincidentally, everyone who cruises 10 miles per hour is a senile old grandma... who's going to get us all killed.
So it is with following player evaluation and procurement in professional and college sports. There are people among us who, right now, can give you their top five projected strong-side defensive ends in the 2026 NFL draft, along with every draftable prospect in the Missouri Valley Football Conference. And we let these psychopaths walk among us in society. There are also self-respecting humans who tune into Week 1 to learn who their team drafted. They manage to live with themselves anyway. Don't these freaks know the right way to follow the NFL draft, the way God intended, is to keep it at arm's length until a week or two before, and then treat it as the most important event in the world?
This phenomenon dawned on me this week as I found myself clicking on an article about a baseball player transferring into my college of choice. Quickly, I found myself imagining the level of depravity it would take to follow college baseball to a level where one would have an opinion on whether the All-NEC right fielder was a better transfer prospect than the Oregon State right fielder. Can you imagine? Obviously, the safe, the proper, the right way to follow college baseball is to read a couple season previews in February, check box scores on the team's website through March and April, and then lock in around Memorial Day if your team of choice gives you reason to. If my team signed transfers of note, I'll find out when the season starts. That's how it should be done.
Then, I began to wonder where fans fell on this spectrum with football recruiting.
As of this writing, among the more than 1,000 respondents, the majority of fans follow recruiting moderately closely -- they can name their school's major commits and have an idea how their school's class is tracking, but they leave the tape watching to the insiders. A third do the equivalent of flipping on ESPN as the NFL draft begins to learn who the top prospects are, and one in 12 experience their team's recruiting as it plays out in wins and losses on the field. Only 5.7 percent of respondents dive in deep enough to develop their own opinions on prospects.
Now, a note should be added about the methodology here. This shouldn't be read as 55 percent of college football fans follow recruiting moderately closely, this is 55 percent of respondents who follow college football closely enough to follow me (and other college football news sources) on Twitter are into recruiting enough to follow it moderately close.
How closely do you follow recruiting
— Zach Barnett (@zach_barnett) June 23, 2025
"If you aren't a coach," one respondent said, "recruiting is for losers."
Multiple respondents said NIL and the portal have taken a lot of fun out of the game.
"The current environment where players leave after one year is hurting my desire to keep following recruiting like I have," said one. "Should have added a 'I used to Pre NIL era' option," said another.
"Verbal commitments mean nothing anymore. If it isn’t ink on paper, I don’t care," added another, although I'm positive that particular sentiment has been around recruiting for the 20 years I've been following it, and almost certainly longer. Kids these days is a complaint as old as the concept of children and days.
All that written, the House settlement includes provisions that should -- emphasis on should -- make it more difficult for players to flip on commitments and to leave their original school after a year. As part of the House settlement, as explained by the Tallahassee Democrat, "if there is a buyout clause in a player's contract, the school that the player is transferring into must pay the entirety of the buyout to the school that the player departed from. The buyout also counts against the paying school's cap, but cannot be added to the receiving school's cap."
Ultimately, there is no right or wrong way to follow or not follow recruiting. Watch or don't watch all the tape you want. Unlike highway driving, where I would ask you all to please speed up or slow down depending on your relationship to my speed.