In this weekly series, I take to our subscribers-only message board, The Trough, to answer all the questions you have about Arkansas Razorback football recruiting.
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I love this question, and to be completely honest I wish I had a better answer for you.
The game we are getting ready to watch Saturday at 2:30 p.m. is, though still the greatest sport on the face of the planet, is not the college football that you or I know and have come to have loved.
Between NIL, conference realignment and the portal, the job description of head coach may finally be creeping up to the multi-million dollar price tag, and a large part of that is balancing your roster.
With so much talent and so little patience, we're seeing tremendous amounts of talent migrate into the portal prematurely. While that's a great advantage for teams on the rise on paper, it becomes much trickier when paired with the probability of those top prospects actually choosing to spread out. I think you certainly need to pick up players, and good ones, in the transfer portal to reach elite status as a program, but you also have to remember that recruiting is the lifeblood of your program.
The right balance, at least in my opinion, is finding guys you like out of the high school ranks, developing them, keeping them as long as you're able, and bringing in help from the portal in positions of need or for depth purposes. Anything less leaves you wandering in mediocrity and anything more sets you up for total meltdown with one wrong move.
I think it truly depends on the on-field product that Arkansas is able to put forth this season.
Now, I'm not saying slipping a game or two from last season's nine-win total will sound the alarms, but high-caliber recruits want to win at the next level.
With that said, I think we could easily see a top-15-type class similar to 2023 on the high end of the potential scale, but if things go catastrophically wrong then I wouldn't put bottoming out around the No. 30 spot out of the question.
