Built Different: A new way to measure talent on SEC football rosters
The transfer portal and CFP expansion have changed the game. So how can we go beyond recruiting rankings to find out who can truly contend?
Not that long ago, it was really easy to project who had the most “talent” coming into the season. You simply looked at team’s last three or four recruiting classes and, from there, you could very quickly and neatly place teams in obvious tiers.
And while that exercise is still useful, the world of roster building and talent acquisition has drastically changed in recent cycles with the advent of the transfer portal and the official adoption of pay-to-play via revenue-sharing and NIL.
On top of those changes, there’s a larger pool of teams who get to actually compete for the national title, thanks to the current 12-team playoff.
Last year’s national champion, Indiana, broke all the previous assumptions and expectations for what a championship roster is supposed to look like.
In fact, the CFP semifinalists were a collection of differently built teams in Indiana (portal-heavy, 3-star evaluation hits), Oregon (elite HS recruiting), Miami (high-end HS recruiting paired with transfers) and Ole Miss (all-in transfer-heavy).
The days of a few teams stockpiling a bunch of blue-chip recruits — and those few teams keeping a vice grip on the championship — appears dead.
So how do we measure talent now?
I won’t pretend I have an obvious answer, but solving this problem has been my pet project since 2023. It just felt inevitable that the older way of tracking talent doesn’t necessarily translate as cleanly as it once did. We need a more robust model to understand what a “good roster” looks like.
Here’s my ever-evolving attempt at understanding and evaluating “roster talent” in this brave new world of college football, ahead of what should be a wild 2026 season of SEC football.
Terminology
Let’s start with some vocabulary, as it will ladder up into a matrix of values that hopefully make some sort of sense.
Blue-Chip Recruit - A high school or junior college prospect who was rated as a 4-star or 5-star recruit by the 247Sports Composite at the time of signing.
Impact Transfer - A transfer player who either:
Started at their previous program, or
Was a former Blue Chip Recruit and retains at least three seasons of eligibility.
This metric is designed to identify transfers with either proven college production or significant remaining upside.
5-Star Count - The number of former 5-star recruits currently on the roster who originally signed with the program out of high school or junior college. Five-star recruits who transferred into the program are evaluated as Impact Transfers rather than inside the 5-Star Count.
Top-100 Count - The number of former 247Sports Composite Top-100 recruits currently on the roster who originally signed with the program out of high school or junior college. Top-100 recruits who transferred into the program are evaluated as Impact Transfers.
Blue-Chip Ratio (BCR) - The percentage of a program's high school and junior college signees who were Blue Chip Recruits. Transfers and walk-ons are excluded.
True Blue-Chip Ratio (True BCR) - The percentage of the current scholarship roster comprised of Blue Chip Recruits originally signed by the program out of high school or junior college.
Transfer Ratio (TR) - The percentage of the current scholarship roster comprised of transfer players.
Impact Transfer Count (ITC) - The number of Impact Transfers currently on the roster.
Impact Player Ratio (IPR) - The percentage of the scholarship roster comprised of either Blue Chip Recruits or Impact Transfers. This metric attempts to capture both traditional recruiting success and proven talent acquisition through the transfer portal.
That’s a lot, but hopefully it makes some kind of sense. It undoubtedly has holes. A team is not “rewarded” in these grades if they sign a 3-star player and develop that player into an All-American caliber talent. Only if that player, after starting at one program, transferred to another, would they show up in the Impact Player Ratio.
In my mind, you must look across the different metrics to get a complete view of a program. There are teams that can dominate the portal but struggle to sign top-end high school talent. Some teams continue to invest heavily in high school recruiting but lack the proven veteran talent.
I should note that I gather this data by hand. It involves reviewing teams’ rosters and then cross-checking those players against 247 Composite and production at previous schools. Chances are very high I got something wrong for a team or missed something during the process. But I feel quite confident that I have captured, at a high level, the general state of a team’s roster.
So, with that as a backdrop, here’s a look at what the data says about the SEC heading into 2026.