It’s been covered a million times. Kids leave, transfer, quit, take medicals every year. Most years is 10-15; now it seems like it will be 20-25. Coaches should understand what is going on and plan accordingly.
Hell we only had 3 kids portal after signing day. So we would have been at, what, 76? Still 9 short of 85 at that time.
For starters, you can't plan accordingly when you don't know who will transfer or when. This is one reason we need set windows for kids to enter the portal. Secondly, when it does happen, you don't automatically just fill up the vacant spots with HS signees or mid-year transfers. With the transfer portal now always active, you don't just take a kid at signing day just to fill your roster spots. There's a second wave of guys that hit the portal post-Spring practice so it's smart to save spots to pick up any of those guys you can. We had 4 go in the portal after signing day, and Ivey went in 2 days before it. You don't just go find any DE in 2 days to replace him. So that's 5, we would be at 78. We also have 3 guys that were just recently declared medically ineligible for football. The staff may have expected or known those so we'll keep it at 78. With the amount of depth we need currently, it's smart to save those 7 spots for transfers with experience that can be game ready. Coaches aren't psychic so they couldn't plan ahead for 12 open spots instead of 7.
You can call it excuses all you want but with the transfer portal and kids still out there with extra Covid years, it's extremely difficult to sign full HS classes unless you already have the room in December. It's not a GT thing, it's happening everywhere. Here's a breakdown of the ACC since 2019 (CGC's first recruiting class).
ACC teams with 20+ HS signees:
2019 - 11
2020 - 9
2021 - 7
2022 - 3
The past couple of years some of those teams only had 20+ signees because they were teams like VT and BC that had some low classes in 19/20 and a bunch of transfers out with very few in. They had a lot of signees but it didn't necessarily translate to a high ranking or "good" class. Here is the average number of recruits for the top 5 ranked classes since 2019.
ACC top 5 average number of HS signees:
2019 - 24
2020 - 24
2021 - 20
2022 - 18
Here's another look at GT total number in each class counting HS and transfers since 2019:
2019: 21 HS / 5 T = 26 Total
2020: 24 HS / 3 T = 27 Total
2021: 16 HS / 10 T = 26 Total
2022: 15 HS / 7 T = 22 Total
So we are already at 22 total for the 2022 class and haven't even added any post-Spring transfers. Looks to me like we are about where we should be and probably about where they had planned to be but didn't expect as many transfers. And for whoever asked have we ever started a season with 85 scholarship players, yes every year.
