Watching all these draft risers and sleeper picks get talked about on ESPN, the names from Georgia State and North Dakota State getting buzz, it just reinforces what we should be doing but aren't. The real recruiting edge for a program like ours isn't in chasing the four-star high schoool kid who has ten SCIAC offers, it's in finding that juco or FCS transfer who is a year or two away from being that exact draft sleeper. We need to be the program that identifies the Max Iheanachor types before they blow up at Arizona State, the Barika Kpeenu before he's a known commodity from North Dakota State. That's how you build sustainably when you can't win the NIL bidding wars for ready-made P4 portal starters.
Our staff talks about development all the time, and that's great, but development requires raw material. The best raw material we can realistically get right now is sitting in the juco ranks or at an FCS school, hungry and overlooked. Every single one of those coaches on that ESPN list is talking up a kid who wasn't a five-star, who had to prove it. That's our demographic. Yet, when I look at our portal activity, it's quiet. The winter window is gone, and we're supposedly locked in on 2027 high school kids. That's fine for the future, but what about the 2026 roster? Where is the aggressive push for the diamond in the rough who can step in at defensive end or linebacker and be a force by October?
Think about the timeline. A juco sleeper comes in for spring ball, gets a full summer in the system, and by fall camp he's competing for a starting job. He's got two, maybe three years of eligibility. That's a program-building block. Instead, we're risking getting into late-summer desperation mode, scrambling for whatever portal scraps are left after the big boys have eaten, or rolling with guys who we know aren't at that championship level. The SCIAC is won in the trenches, and the trenches are where these grown men from the juco circuit can make an immediate impact. It's not a complicated formula.
Hearing noise about a few local 3-stars is good for morale, but it doesn't move the needle for the season that's five months away. The blueprint is right there in the news....