It’s time to evaluate how you evaluate prospects.
A few minutes on the real math behind every prospect your staff evaluates this cycle.
It’s time to evaluate how you evaluate prospects.
Right now, moving a single prospect from watching to a real war room conversation takes about 115 minutes — scribbling notes, writing up a full report afterward, entering it into compliance software, and often a spreadsheet on top of that just to make sense of it all.
A staff evaluating 125 to 300 prospects a cycle is spending somewhere between 240 and 575 hours on that process alone — before a single comparison is made, before a single offer goes out.
The Time
At a coach’s actual hourly value, that’s real money spent on data entry instead of coaching:
That’s not a one-time cost. That’s every cycle, indefinitely, for as long as the process stays the same.
The Roster Dollars
Mid-major programs commonly run $1 to $2 million a year in combined revenue share and NIL, across a 15-man roster. But that money isn’t spread evenly.
Publicly reported pay differentials show rotational players earning roughly 15–25% less than starters, and bench players earning 30–55% less. Applied to a typical mid-major roster, your top 6 to 8 rotation players are likely absorbing somewhere around 70–85% of your total roster budget, while your remaining bench spots split what’s left.
This is a reasonable estimate based on known pay differentials, not a confirmed figure for your specific program — if you have real numbers, they’ll sharpen this considerably.
That means the highest-stakes evaluations on your board — the ones deciding who fills those top 6 to 8 spots — are also the ones where a miss costs the most. A wrong read there isn’t a marginal loss. It’s a disproportionate share of your entire roster budget spent on the wrong person.
The Portal Reality
Money already committed doesn’t come back if a player underperforms. And in the transfer portal era, a bad allocation doesn’t even buy you the rest of the season to figure it out — staffs are often back in the market evaluating a replacement before the year is over, while the original dollars are already gone.
The Coverage Gap
Time constraints cap how many prospects a staff can actually get through. That’s the least visible cost, and possibly the most expensive one: a smaller evaluated pool means a real chance the best available player for a spot on your roster was never seen at all — not misjudged, just never in the sample.
That doesn’t show up as an obvious mistake. It shows up as a ceiling on how good the roster could have been, and nobody ever sees the players that got missed.
The Competitive Gap
Every minute spent on write-ups and data entry is a minute a competing program — one that’s already solved this — is spending building a relationship with the same recruit, or evaluating a prospect your staff never got to.
In the portal era specifically, a program with a documented evaluation history on a player is a step ahead of a staff meeting him for the first time. That gap compounds every cycle it isn’t closed.
The Bottom Line
None of this is hypothetical. It’s the current, ongoing cost of a process that hasn’t changed even as the stakes around it have completely changed — bigger rosters, real dollars, a transfer portal that punishes slow decisions.
None of it requires you to change how you evaluate talent. Your eye is not the problem. The process carrying it is.
Book a 10-minute conversation