The SEC Forum at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

Florida's November:
Georgia
@ Texas
LSU
Ole Miss
@ FSU
.
Here's my problem.
Florida could/would/should be a VERY strong team in 2025.  But that's pre-transfer portal thinking.  Instead of having a proud, battle-tested roster full of talent and coming of age, our roster will just be shitty by then.
Players leaving.  Tough schedule = bad record = exodus of talent.
It's especially shitty.
And it's already started.
.
Fuck this.

Florida could improve, a lot, next season, and finish 8-4.  Maybe that would save a certain job there?

UGA could be about the same and finish 9-3 fairly easily.

This is pre-portal thinking.  Our best RB is leaving.  Our best pass-rusher is gone.  

The portal causes snowball effects - good and bad.  If you're losing the normal amount of talent and have a net plus influx, you're rolling right along.  If you're losing normal talent AND also veteran talent, your fight is getting out of hand and much tougher.  

Conversely, it can also be a lot faster to turn everything around.  Texas and FSU turned themselves into contenders this year by adding a handful of portal kids that made impacts.  Theoretically, so long as there's a coaching staff a kid can jive with, schools with good NIL markets can be in good shape to buy their way to victory. 

That's where I think we're going to fall behind.  As far as profitable athletic depts, we were fine there.  When it comes to local businesses buying us a good roster, well, we aren't going to be competing with Texas and anyone like them. 

Really, to have a truly rounded NIL capability, your school has to be located in or very close to an affluent,  major city.

National recruits/players are going to get national offers/deals no matter where they go.  And school-booster-based collectives are going to eventually top out and begin canceling one another to a certain extent.

That means there's a lower tier of recruit, just under the big national guys, that are going to be targeted by local businesses.  Big city local businesses can offer Lamborghini leases for free, while smaller towns just don't have that type of opportunity available.

We've seen this sub-national-tier NIL sway more than a few recruits to Texas already.

You can really argue more of the same.  Schools like TCU and KSU have done more with less, while A&M and Texas have had plenty of talent that got squandered.  The only difference is that where the smaller schools would find the diamond in the rough now they will leave once they establish that they are a great player for better NIL  money. 

Yeah it's a really unfortunate turn of events for those smaller/less resourced schools. As I've said before, even though this is the exact scenario which will most benefit my favorite team, overall it's really bad for the sport.  

I've heard that TCU has a few really rich (or maybe a lot of really rich) boosters who have powered the program since the end of the SWC.  So maybe they can keep up with the Joneses. 

Could be.  But the B12 will now get even less exposure and less respect than before, and that's another important piece of the puzzle.

LMGDMFSBAO

I take it back.  Vanderbilt, the Texas-slayer is on the Longhorns' schedule.  That's going to be a tough road for UT after all.