College football roster management has always been a rather fraught affair. Between stars weighing whether to go pro, underplayed underclassmen thinking about transferring, the forever-stressful experience of both winning key recruiting battles and keeping said battles won, everyone needing to keep their grades up and so on, projecting what a roster will look like six months or a year into the future always has come with a pretty large margin for error.
That has gotten even trickier, of course, with the advent of the transfer portal and the NCAA's long-awaited decision to no longer require first-time transfers to sit for a year.