I'm not sure our recruiting philosophy has changed as much as people seem to think

I've seen a lot of commentary over the past couple weeks about how Kelly & company may have rethought the strategy about building the roster through high school recruiting. When I look at the number of transfers we've taken over the past few years, this window (so far) does not look like a massive difference at first glance. I was curious what some of the numbers looked like across the SEC, particularly how the number of transfers per class varied between different SEC programs.

Here is what I came up with:



The graph above shows the range of transfer class sizes for each SEC school, from 2022-2025. So the top of each bar represents the maximum number of transfers taken in a class, while the bottom of each bar represents the smallest number of transfers taken in a class. The horizontal dash is the (current) number of transfer commitments in the 2025 class.

The teams are sorted by average number of transfer commitments per class, from 2022-2025.

The reason I started looking into this was curiosity about whether LSU's actions in the portal this year discount any of Kelly's previous statements about wanting to build the roster through high school recruiting. After putting together the graph above, I realized that it doesn't really tell you much because the number of high school recruits also changes year-to-year and school-to-school.

The following graph attempts to address that by plotting the number of transfers as a percent of the total signing class, rather than a raw number. Again, they are sorted based on average %transfer from 2022-2025:



A few conclusions that stood out to me:

1. I think what we see here is that with few exceptions, the numbers are all over the place. Some of those ranges are really wide.

2. I think LSU has been somewhat middle-of-the-pack in the SEC in terms of both number of transfers taken each year and % transfers in each class, regardless of Kelly's comments about building through HS recruiting. We certainly took less transfers last year (the fewest since Kelly has been at LSU) but even then, they still made up over 20% of our signing class. In other words, I don't think Kelly has been nearly as transfer-averse as his comments might have indicated.

3. I don't think the numbers this year are a massive deviation from what we've seen in the past 3 years, certainly when you compare the variance among our classes with the rest of the conference.

4. My personal opinion is that last year was the outlier more than this year. Some of it was probably due to the ongoing defensive staff changes during the winter portal window. Some was probably due to overestimating the amount of talent that would be available in the spring window. Some of it may have simply been due to NIL availability at the time.

5. One thing worth mentioning - the 2025 cycle is still ongoing. So if we take another 10 guys between now and summer that's obviously going to change my outlook a bit.

Take it or leave it, just thought some folks around here might be interested in some of the numbers above.