re: Got the X's and O's covered, now need Jimmies and Joes

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aTm, Tx, FSU and Old Missy seem to be scooping up the Gumps fleeing Tuscaloser and we haven't gotten any. WHY? Are they too expensive? Has BK been burned by last year and not looking for transfers? Thoughts.

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We don’t have room to indiscriminately take guys just because they’re talented and in the portal. We took a larger HS class than all of those teams with 28 already signed and one committed.

Contrast that with Texas A&M, who lost like 21 players to the portal already and only has 14 HS signees + 1 commit we are trying to flip. They have to take guys from the portal.

On top of that, Kelly has been pretty open about wanting to make sure the transfers that we take are a good fit culturally. We took a risk on Denver Harris and saw how that worked out.

But more than anything I think it comes down to simple numbers. We already have to process more guys just to get down to 85 with our current class. Every transfer that we take is an additional guy we have to process. Processing players is not as simple as it was 10 years ago because the player generally has to leave voluntarily now.

Then consider that we have 35 guys (HS + transfers) incoming who aren’t going to be processed. So you theoretically only have a pool of 50 players who you can process to take more transfers. Half of those are your projected starters. The rest are rotational guys or players who redshirted last year. There’s not much fat to cut.