The 2025 season is a milestone in the quickly changing landscape of college football. It’s the fourth season where NIL was a real factor for recruits in addition to college players. It probably feels like it’s been longer than that, but the first freshmen to get recruited with the concrete reality of compensation outside of scholarships are now seniors.
The free-transfer era is even younger than the NIL era, so we are still all trying to work out what the optimal strategy is for building a team in this time. A few folks like Lane Kiffin and Deion Sanders chose to bet big on transfers.