Rivals national recruiting analyst Adam Friedman has thoughts on the two big announcements by the NCAA this week and the depth of talent at a premium position in the 2025 recruiting class.
RELATED: NCAA drops Letter of Intent
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1. The impact of shorter transfer windows.
This past Tuesday the NCAA reduced the size of the winter and spring transfer windows, down to a total of 30 days instead of 45 days. The winter transfer window will consist of 20 days, starting on the Monday after the conference championship games (Dec. 9) and ending on Dec. 28. The remaining 10 days will come in the spring transfer window, which will go from April 16 to April 25.
This kind of sounds like a retreat by the NCAA, doesn’t it? In August, it was seemingly on track to eliminate the spring transfer window altogether after the recommendation from the Football Oversight Committee. Now, in a rare smart decision by the NCAA, it backed off its original plan and only reduced the size of each of the windows, which is what it did at the exact same meeting in October of last year going from 60 days to 45 days.
Over the last two years, a small fraction of the players who entered the portal did so during the final days of the transfer windows. The NCAA knew this, which is why it made them smaller last year. Eliminating the spring transfer window would have been a big step in the NCAA’s effort to improve the recruiting calendar but this was a step too far while the NCAA tries to work out a settlement in the House Case.
2. A step in the right direction for players’ rights.
Moving on from the National Letter of Intent had been coming for a while but the headline was still a bit jarring. The NCAA announced this week that it will instead use financial aid agreements, which will serve basically the same function as the National Letter of Intent. There were parts of the National Letter of Intent program that were outdated in the age of Name, Image, and Likeness so this type of agreement will give schools the flexibility they need while the House Case settlement is finalized.
Did that explanation put you to sleep? This type of change isn’t exciting for fans but it should allow players to more clearly understand, financially, what it means to sign with one school over another. Under this new setup, players should finally be able to make better informed decisions about how big a priority they are for certain schools. It will likely eliminate situations where players feel lied to by coaches about how much they’re actually going to receive if they sign with that school. Coaches and players should really like how cut and dry this process will become.
3. Shallow pool of talent at receiver in 2025?
For better or worse, we’ve seen a rash of reclassifications since the beginning of the football season. Big-time prospects Jahkeem Stewart, Donovan Murph, Jordan Gidron, Kail Ellis and Malachi Toney now plan on graduating with the 2025 class instead of the 2026 class. Interestingly enough, three of those five players – Murph, Gidron and Toney – are receivers. To see a concentration on one position like this, it may indicate that college coaches don’t see as much depth in the 2025 receiver talent pool.
There are currently 72 four- and five-star receivers in the 2025 class, that’s 13 fewer than there were in 2024. In fact the number of four- and five-star receivers has steadily risen every year starting with the 2019 class, which had 48. This seemingly coincides with the rise in the value of receivers in the NFL Draft.
At least six receivers were selected twice in seven NFL Drafts starting with 2009 and going to 2015 but it has happened three times in the last five drafts – 2020, 2022 and 2024.
Before Murph, Gidron,and Toney reclassified to 2025, the number of four- and five-star receivers would have been 69, just one more than there was in the 2023 class. College teams are starving for explosive playmakers on the outside and, when they can’t find one in the senior class, expect them to continue to search for juniors who have the ability to finish high school early and get on campus faster.