Flock Talk: The Myth of the Shortcut

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Every few years, college football convinces itself it has discovered a new cheat code.

This season, that code is supposedly wearing cream and crimson. Curt Cignetti. Indiana. The transfer portal. Experience over high school recruiting. A narrative neat enough to package, simple enough to sell, and comforting enough for programs that have spent decades staring up from the cellar.

The story goes like this: Indiana cracked something fundamental. They bypassed the old grind of recruiting rankings and player development, stacked older players through the portal, and suddenly changed what it takes to win at the highest level.

It sounds great. It just isn’t true.

What Cignetti did at Indiana wasn’t revolutionary. It was refined. And there is a big difference between the two.

The core formula for winning a national championship has not changed. It never really does. Elite talent evaluation. Talent acquisition, whether through recruiting or the portal. Elite coaching. Experienced quarterback play. That has been the blueprint for decades, even when the window dressing changes.

The portal didn’t rewrite that formula. It simply gave good coaches a sharper tool.

A lot is made of how heavily Indiana leaned into the portal in Cignetti’s first year, but that framing skips an inconvenient detail. The majority of those early transfers were players he already knew. Players he recruited and developed at James Madison. That is not blind portal shopping. That is continuity. That is evaluation. That is trust built over years.

Cignetti didn’t grab random “older guys” and hope experience alone would carry the day. He selectively used the portal to elevate an existing foundation. When Indiana needed a final piece, they added one. Fernando Mendoza in 2025 didn’t create the team. He completed it. A very good roster became a national championship caliber one because the most important position on the field suddenly had both experience and high-end ability.

That part keeps getting glossed over because it complicates the fairy tale.

Look at the semifinalists this past season. Three of the four featured quarterbacks in their fifth year of college football. The exception was Oregon, and even there the Ducks paired elite talent with coaching continuity and a roster built to insulate a younger quarterback. Experience at quarterback still matters. A lot. It always has.

This is where the “portal-only” argument collapses under its own weight.

If age and portal accumulation alone were the answer, Colorado would not have gone 3–8 last season. The portal can amplify strengths, but it does not replace structure. It does not substitute for evaluation. And it certainly does not cover up coaching deficiencies for long.

Cignetti’s real advantage is not that he discovered a new way to build a roster. It is that he understands how to build one better than most.

He has been a head football coach for 15 seasons. He has taken multiple programs through rebuilds. He has lived through different roster rules, different scholarship limits, different transfer eras. He has seen what works, what almost works, and what never works at all. And yes, he spent three seasons working alongside Nick Saban, which tends to sharpen a coach’s understanding of what actually wins when everything is on the line.

That experience matters as much as any portal class.

What Indiana really changed is not the sport, but the expectations placed on coaches at programs like theirs. They showed that a disciplined, experienced staff can accelerate relevance if it already knows the players it is acquiring and understands how those pieces fit together. That is not a shortcut. That is competence applied efficiently.

And it is not replicable at scale.

Programs trying to copy Indiana by simply chasing older portal players without the same evaluation history, the same quarterback hit, or the same coaching depth are going to find out quickly that this story has a hard ceiling. The portal rewards clarity. It punishes desperation.

For Oregon, this is not a cautionary tale. It is a reaffirmation.

The Ducks have leaned into high school recruiting because elite talent acquisition still matters. They have used the portal selectively because fit still matters. And they have built toward quarterback continuity because the postseason still belongs to teams that are calm and experienced when everything tightens.

There was no code cracked in Bloomington. The old one just ran clean.

College football changes constantly on the surface. The deeper truths stay stubbornly the same. The teams that win are still the ones that evaluate well, coach better, and arrive in December with a quarterback who has seen just about everything already.

Everything else is just noise, dressed up as revelation.

2027 RECRUITING BEGINS IN EARNEST

While we have not yet reached the ‘official’ signing day for the class of 2026, the 2027 class will start their junior day visits this weekend with a solid group of visitors set to make it to town to check out the program. Not all of them will be first time visitors and there are going to be some names on here you recognize.

I already laid out some key details on my premium site, feel free to subscribe and check that out right here: https://ducksports.substack.com/p/wednesday-war-room-2027-cycle-picks?r=vtxsn

Meanwhile, here is an updated list with a couple of new names since Wednesday.

JANUARY 24 VISITOR LIST

2027

2028

 

 

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