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!!
 




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.
 


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.
Click to expand...
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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