The Athletic: Grading the Big Ten’s transfer portal classes (Minnesota: B-)

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BleedGopher

BleedGopher

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Per Manny:

Minnesota​

  • 2025 record: 8-5
  • Portal players added/lost: 19/21
  • Career snaps added/lost: 8,204/4,782
  • Top players added: WR Zion Steptoe (Tulsa), WR Perry Thompson (Auburn), TE Kaden Helms (Oklahoma), edge TJ Bush (Cal), LB Andrew Marshall (Eastern Michigan)
After operating at a 50-50 clip between high school recruits and the portal last year, P.J. Fleck went heavier on high school recruits (31) this cycle and signed a top-30 class. The portal additions include 10 players who played at least 200 snaps last season, but only half did so for P4 programs. Fleck signed a trio of quality receivers who will help second-year starting quarterback Drake Lindsey, but he lost two high-end talents in his secondary in Koi Perich (Oregon) and cornerback Za’Quan Bryan (USF). It just feels like the Gophers sort of broke even.

Grade: B-

www.nytimes.com

Grading the Big Ten’s transfer portal classes, from Indiana’s ‘A’ to Michigan State’s ‘D+’

The defending national champs filled some big holes in the portal, most notably at quarterback with the arrival of Josh Hoover from TCU.
www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com

Go Gophers!!
 






A_Slab_of_Bacon said:
I suspect portal grades are about as good as draft grades ... that is to say ... not really.

I hope we did well, but only time will tell.
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Draft, recruiting, transfer portal......the grades should all happen after the season (or in the case of a recruiting class, multiple years later) but we are in that time when they need content to fill the down time so the rankings happen now.

We have lost a few good players to the portal but overall it has been a net positive over the years. Hopefully this turns out to be a strong group but time will tell.
 

It feels better than a B- to me. We gained players with, in aggregate, double the snap count of the players we lost. Recent game day experience and battles at the college level is a positive, I think. I prefer these guys for plug-and-play impact (over highly-rated guys out of HS who haven't seen the field in two years). Plus, I think PJ did well this year recruiting for need and fit, neither of which attributes are (or can be) the subject of a unitary overall grade for a transfer player. The author might have taken fit into consideration--I can't tell because the full article was behind a paywall.

Losing Perich hurts; losing Bryan kind of hurts. But it appears we have gained several more potential impact players than we have lost. Including some on offense where we had relative deficits last year. So, my biased view is that this is actually about a B+ transfer class. But as many have observed, the first fact-based opportunity to grade this transfer class will occur at about the halfway point of the 2026 season.

Where I feel a little queasy about this transfer class is that we brought in only transfer OL to potentially help shore up the RT position. And that guy, though highly-rated out of HS, is a RS So who hasn't played much yet. Could he be a development piece? Maybe our 2026 RT comes from within. We've got a few young guys who are bigger than this transfer OL guy, and who have practiced in our system for a year or two.

Go Gophers.
 
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GopherTheJugular said:
Any other name on the back of that jersey and we'd be talking about an upgrade at safety. "Addition by subtraction", "can't get any worse", etc.
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people are really overstating how bad the perich season was. he took a step back from his freshman season and made a few mistakes, but "can't get any worse" is crazy. the dude had a game winning pick 6 lol.
 

boozer said:
people are really overstating how bad the perich season was. he took a step back from his freshman season and made a few mistakes, but "can't get any worse" is crazy. the dude had a game winning pick 6 lol.
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Think it is a combination of him not playing at a superstar level and the epic disaster that the Cal game was for him.

Totally agree that he was not as bad as some on here have tried to make him out to be he just didn't live up to the hype that came from his freshman season. The bar for him was set incredibly high and he failed to reach that bar. Still a solid player just not the star it looked like he was going to be.
 



All depends on how the incoming guys pan out, but as far as proven production at this level, in vs out I give the transfer class a C+/B-, lost Perich and Ijeboi, brought in Bush, Aydan West, maybe throw Helms in there. Just these would seem like a negative grade, but the potential of the unknown/unproven incoming guys is greater than that of the outgoing in my opinion. But unless some of the unproven blow up, this transfer class doesn’t move the needle much for me as far as elevating the program.
 

The moment we secured Edge TJ Bush, I thought this could be a helluva D-line in 2026.

There's some other nice parts at WR, TE, and DB, too.
 

Gophergrandpa said:
The author might have taken fit into consideration--I can't tell because the full article was behind a paywall.
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I doubt it, that would be a ton of work to do for each team, and almost impossible since you'd have to have like our knowledge level of the Gophers, but for all the B1G teams.
 

GoldRush said:
Bryan is not much of a loss aside from depth. Perich is obviously a loss but if you view it from a salary standpoint and what we have behind him, not a huge loss. I would say our portal class is more A-/B+ at least on paper.
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I bet if you polled the average fan of any CFB team they would give their portal class the same grade. These kind of things are great exercises to keep our football starved minds from atrophy during the offseason. Where does the grading scale break down? I would venture that an "A" or "B" now would be reserved for teams that improved. A "C" would probably mean, did not get worse or appreciably better. Of course, below that would mean you got worse. Except for the teams who have the resources and can buy name brand players on big deals, I would think that a vast middle ground of CFB teams would garner a "C" at this point.
 



boozer said:
people are really overstating how bad the perich season was. he took a step back from his freshman season and made a few mistakes, but "can't get any worse" is crazy. the dude had a game winning pick 6 lol.
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Well yeah he left.

Coping mechanism here lol 😂

I’d agree his was up and down and didn’t tackle very well. If people think we’re better without him I totally disagree
 

gopherbadgerman said:
Well yeah he left.

Coping mechanism here lol 😂

I’d agree his was up and down and didn’t tackle very well. If people think we’re better without him I totally disagree
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There is potential that we are a better team without him. If we can get similar production to what we got out of Koi last year from someone else (which is not impossible because he was solid but not spectacular), AND we can use the money saved by not having to pay Koi superstar money to upgrade at other positions there is a chance the net effect on the team is a positive with him leaving.

Best case scenario would always have been Koi staying but it is possible that his leaving made some of the other portal moves we were able to make happen. Unfortunately we will never really know for sure because it is so tough to know what players are actually getting.
 

swede2 said:
I bet if you polled the average fan of any CFB team they would give their portal class the same grade. These kind of things are great exercises to keep our football starved minds from atrophy during the offseason. Where does the grading scale break down? I would venture that an "A" or "B" now would be reserved for teams that improved. A "C" would probably mean, did not get worse or appreciably better. Of course, below that would mean you got worse. Except for the teams who have the resources and can buy name brand players on big deals, I would think that a vast middle ground of CFB teams would garner a "C" at this point.
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I think grading these things is also relative to your payroll. At least that's how I view it. I certainly don't ever expect the Twins to get the free agents the Yankees do.
 

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