The arrival of NIL had many college football pontificators — including myself — imagining a world where the impregnable grip that the same eight teams had on all the blue chip talent coming out of high school started to loosen up. And while the top-rated 5-star recruits have started to proliferate to schools outside the usual blue bloods, for the most part the highest ranked recruiting teams of the past 20 years are still the highest ranked recruiting teams.
Thanks to the portal, however, those schools’ vise-like grip on the talent is starting to slip. Talented high schoolers who bet on themselves beating out the incumbents at those elite recruiting schools — and still finding themselves buried on the depth chart — now have the chance to give other schools a shot, thinning out the massive talents that your Alabamas, Ohio States, and Georgias have over the rest of the country.