Yeah I stopped trying to keep up with high school recruiting over a decade ago. Trying to follow the annual roster changes due to unlimited free agency sounds awful to me.
I, too, will just watch the players on the field, once they finally suit up. In many ways it's refreshing to approach the game like a casual fan.
It's like all of college football is that first UK basketball team with Calipari.....just wholesale changes and hoping for greatness.
The challenge, and my lack of ability and desire to keep up with it, compounds exponentially in that to some extent the same thing affects the other league teams as well. In the previous era, I might reasonably offer an expectation for LSU with +/- margin of 1, maybe 2 W/L's. I did that not only with knowledge of LSU, but also knowledge of the teams on our schedule. I didn't predict us in a vacuum, but rather I had to look at the scheduled competition and have a good idea about their rosters and staffs as well. Maybe nobody portal'd as hard as LSU did this offseason, but the fact that everybody does it means that in addition to not keeping up with our potential, I don't know anyone else's either. It used to be that there were a handful of teams with a realistic shot of beating us, and I would know their returning QBs, or maybe I put less confidence in them because of a new QB, and I could similarly evaluate each position group on down the line. Not to say I could always name Auburn's backup left guard, but I had an okay sense of the major players and quality of position groups and how it might all mesh together to either beat us or come up short.
Now I have nothing but name/brand recognition. I vaguely assume Texas has a lot of money and will be good. Do I know any of their players except Arch Manning? Nope. I vaguely assume Clanga will not be on par with us, but I know of literally nothing to back that up. Everybody else? Who the hell knows? It would be a pure guessing game of random chance on my part, not a prediction with any reason behind it.
Best I can say is that with as much $ as we've thrown at the problem, you'd hope that a winning conference record of 5-4 would be the absolute floor, and that with as many new pieces trying to figure out how they fit together, 7-2 is probably the ceiling. But that's 1) a wide range--obviously hedging--which is barely worthy of anything I would formerly call a good "prediction," and 2) extremely vague, being based on nothing more than feels and vibes about the team, factoring in nothing, and knowing nothing, about any of the competition on the schedule.
