...and that's the battle that PJ lost, leading to this 5-7 season. Bringing in a couple of nice players (and several that don't belong at this level) each year just isn't going to cut it. He's going to have to up his transfer portal game quite a bit to continue to field a competent squad.
80-90% of the 19 in the transfer portal last year either left because they were not playing or because they were told they weren't going to play. It's how it works...we can't recruit 25 high school kids and add 10, 11 transfer portal potential upgrade targets unless 19-20 some guys leave.
Two guys who played in 2022 at linebacker left....evidently on their own. They had 33 and 19 tackles at linebacker for the Gophers in '22. PJ says this is why we struggled in 2023. To replace these two guys we recruited 3 LB's in the transfer portal. To your point we evidently evaluated poorly. The guys who left played the full schedule in '23 and had similar production to '22 once again at their new schools. Not program or season's fortunes changers.
We did have injuries at linebacker with Cody Lindenberg missing the majority games.
Same with LeCaptain also missing with injury.
My point, it wasn't NIL that wrecked our season as PJ repeated each press conference.
Poor evaluation and bad luck with injuries was a bigger factor. "Every team has injuries.
Facts not excuses."
For context: In 2018 our linebackers recorded the following tackles.
Cashman 104, Barber 81, Martin 59, Coughlin 48, and Huff 21.
In 2023:
Williams 52, Baranowski 52, Selig 31 (Transfer) (wash numbers wise to one departing LB?)
Lindenberg 25, Stolsky 20, Kingsbury 4, Mau 4