[SamuelMcF]

It looks like we offered Overton, but his top five are Georgia, Ohio State, Oklahoma, Oregon and Texas A&M.

Indeed we did offer. Reclassified right after visiting College Station. Aggie.

That $30M investment in paying recruits is really paying off for them this cycle.

And people are going to still argue schools shouldn't pay the labor?  This is as silly as having a law that says PACs can't coordinate with the candidates for elected office that they endorse.

Although, I must admit, if schools don't pay the athletes, it certainly would be easy to spin off football and basketball programs as professional entities that have nothing to do with the schools. The schools can just license the teams to use their NIL and lease their stadiums. 

The idea that people are suppose to believe they aren't professional sports now, is an insult to the intelligence of anyone who can observe reality. School and education has about nothing to do with any of it, so please stop pretending it does.

Stanford might be the only school for which the school part actually matters, and even then, Stanford drops its standards for elite athletes to join its teams, just not as much as other schools.

Not that I necessarily disagree with your points here (yes, CFB (especially the SEC) is just a professional NFL minor league now and has been for years), but...

Overton is a 5* mega-whale. Even if they are great students, 5* mega-whales almost never consider us in the first place, but now even more so because we aren't going to major bowls anymore. Guys like that who have good grades and even taken AP classes know they can absolutely breeze by school, graduate in 3-4 years no problem, and have degree in hand when they inevitably declare for the NFL (who already is keeping tabs on them because they are absolutely dominant players). This type of player is the football equivalent of a 5* MBB one-and-done, with somewhat worse odds. (But I think the "hit rate" of the top guys getting to the NFL is still very very high overall, and certainly much higher than any lower-ranked group.) Only once in a blue moon are they considering Stanford nowadays, ESPECIALLY when the team is in dire straits.

A wonderful example is Kayvon Thibodeaux, who was one of our first offers a few years ago. He didn't even include Stanford in his TOP TWELVE, despite his 4.0 and stating how important academics were to him. It was always - and only - about a "good enough" academic school (whether Oregon is "good enough" is a separate discussion) and the NFL. Stanford's academics - and requiring changing HS schedules to account for multiple AP classes - just get in the way for these guys.

[SamuelMcF]

It looks like we offered Overton, but his top five are Georgia, Ohio State, Oklahoma, Oregon and Texas A&M.

Indeed we did offer. Reclassified right after visiting College Station. Aggie.

That $30M investment in paying recruits is really paying off for them this cycle.

And people are going to still argue schools shouldn't pay the labor?  This is as silly as having a law that says PACs can't coordinate with the candidates for elected office that they endorse.

Although, I must admit, if schools don't pay the athletes, it certainly would be easy to spin off football and basketball programs as professional entities that have nothing to do with the schools. The schools can just license the teams to use their NIL and lease their stadiums. 

The idea that people are suppose to believe they aren't professional sports now, is an insult to the intelligence of anyone who can observe reality. School and education has about nothing to do with any of it, so please stop pretending it does.

Stanford might be the only school for which the school part actually matters, and even then, Stanford drops its standards for elite athletes to join its teams, just not as much as other schools.

Not that I necessarily disagree with your points here (yes, CFB (especially the SEC) is just a professional NFL minor league now and has been for years), but...

Overton is a 5* mega-whale. Even if they are great students, 5* mega-whales almost never consider us in the first place, but now even more so because we aren't going to major bowls anymore. Guys like that who have good grades and even taken AP classes know they can absolutely breeze by school, graduate in 3-4 years no problem, and have degree in hand when they inevitably declare for the NFL (who already is keeping tabs on them because they are absolutely dominant players). This type of player is the football equivalent of a 5* MBB one-and-done, with somewhat worse odds. (But I think the "hit rate" of the top guys getting to the NFL is still very very high overall, and certainly much higher than any lower-ranked group.) Only once in a blue moon are they considering Stanford nowadays, ESPECIALLY when the team is in dire straits.

A wonderful example is Kayvon Thibodeaux, who was one of our first offers a few years ago. He didn't even include Stanford in his TOP TWELVE, despite his 4.0 and stating how important academics were to him. It was always - and only - about a "good enough" academic school (whether Oregon is "good enough" is a separate discussion) and the NFL. Stanford's academics - and requiring changing HS schedules to account for multiple AP classes - just get in the way for these guys.