Portal Era Has Broken Preview Season
Bill Connelly
"Updating the team spreadsheets, entering the recruiting class, that probably took 25 minutes per team a decade ago. It took an hour and 20 minutes per team this year. And there were more teams. Every year that goes by, there's more reason to dislike what huge conferences have done to college football. But really, I resent what it's done to me."
Context
Bill's structural diagnostic on what the portal era has done to the preview-writing process. The first SP+ post used to ship in early February; this year it didn't ship until late March because rosters weren't stable enough until then. Spring evaluation gets vaguer every year because of new players, new coaches, and players being held out of spring games (or no spring game at all).
The take generalizes — the portal era has degraded the predictive value of any pre-summer evaluation work, not just the prep-time cost.
Subject(s)
- Bill Connelly
- The preview-writing process broadly