For decades, powerhouses like Ohio State, Alabama, and Georgia treated high school recruiting as the lifeblood of sustained dominance, with coaches like Nick Saban obsessing over every five-star evaluation and Ryan Day following the same blueprint in Columbus. But the way Indiana constructed its title-winning roster has forced the sport’s traditional giants to reassess what winning now actually looks like, to the point where Ohio State’s front office might just be preparing to mirror that exact approach.

Ohio State’s GM Mark Pantoni appeared for an interview with Adrian Wojnarowski on February 4 and talked about how the Buckeyes are now pondering a new approach to roster building. “I think the Indiana model in football has shown us that having older players, having an older team does mean something,” Pantoni said. “And so philosophically, we are trying to determine, okay, how much financials are we going to put in the high school world now?

“How big is the high school class going to look now? And then is it better in the long run, or really in a one-season model, to go in the portal and take older, more proven guys rather than trying to pay a lot of money to get kids here out of high school? They’re probably not going to play a lot in year one, maybe year two, and then you’re having a lot of dead money,” Pantoni added.

Ohio State has consistently landed top blue-chip talent, five-star recruits, and produced top-10 recruiting classes. OSU’s 2025 class ranked 5th nationally and had 69% blue chip commits, not to mention three 5-star players. Going back in the 2024 cycle, OSU again produced a 4th-ranked recruiting class and had 70% blue chips committs along with Jeremiah Smith as the sole five-star recruit. Indiana’s recruiting classes, in comparison, lag massively in sheer numbers.

And yet, Indiana’s championship run directly challenged one of college football’s longest-standing assumptions, that elite titles are won almost exclusively by rosters stacked with four- and five-star prospects. In the modern recruiting era, every national champion had previously posted a Blue-Chip Ratio north of 50 percent. The Hoosiers arrived at the title game with just seven former blue-chip players on the entire roster, fewer than every Power 4 playoff team and ahead of only Group of 5 programs like Tulane and James Madison.

Around the sport, coaches took notice. One Power 4 assistant at the AFCA convention summed it up bluntly: “You don’t need the best guys, you need the right guys.” Indiana’s rise wasn’t about chasing recruiting stars. It was about identifying experience, maturity, production, and fit.

In the 2024 cycle, Curt Cignetti, who is now on a $93 million contract, took in a 60th-ranked recruiting class and has just 6% blue chips amongst 17 high school players. Even in the 2025 cycle, Cignetti had a 53rd-ranked class, with a single blue-chip recruit amongst 23 commits. Yet, Indiana finished with 11 wins in the 2024 season and won the national title in 2025, beating bluebloods like Ohio State, Alabama, and Oregon. What’s the secret sauce of Curt Cignetti’s roster building?

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As outlined by Pantoni, Indiana has emphasized veteran starters, mostly from the transfer portal, instead of high school recruiting. In the Hoosiers’ 2025 roster, 36 players came from the transfer portal and comprised the bulk of the team’s starters. Right from Fernando Mendoza, RB Roman Hemby, Elijah Sarratt, DL Mikail Kamara, and Mario Landino, all of whom came from the portal.

But the portal approach wasn’t random either. Cignetti inherited pieces from former head coach Tom Allen, 28 players in total, and layered proven production on top of that foundation. Of those holdovers, seven ended up starting at least 10 games. Meanwhile, Cignetti’s own additions included 33 transfers across the 2024 and 2025 cycles and 43 high school recruits who remain on the roster.

What separated Indiana from most portal-heavy teams was experience. In Cignetti’s second major transfer class alone, 16 of 18 offensive and defensive additions arrived with double-digit career starts already on their résumé. Across the full roster, Indiana accumulated 920 combined career starts, more than any team in the College Football Playoff field, including Ohio State, Georgia, and Alabama.

But Cignetti hasn’t emphasized blindly acquiring portal players. The key is to leverage experience wherever he can find it. IU’s 2025 roster had 30 seniors and 19 juniors. Moreover, amongst the players who started 10 or more games, 9 players graduated from high school between 2019 and 2021. Retaining experience was so important for Cignetti that he even had 28 of the former head coach, Tom Allen’s, recruited players on the 2025 roster. The portal-heavy and leveraging experience approach, though, isn’t limited to Indiana only.

Most of Indiana’s starting lineup reflected that veteran-first philosophy. Eight offensive starters were transfers, while the defense leaned nearly evenly between portal additions and developed recruits. Five starters even followed Cignetti from James Madison, reinforcing how much trust the staff placed in proven production over recruiting pedigree.

College Football is having a landscape change owing to NIL and the transfer portal

Texas Tech was another team that built heavily through the portal. Before 2026, the team managed to sign a single top-100 recruit. But they still got future NFL draftees like David Bailey and Romello Heights from the portal. Texas Tech also had just 20 blue-chip recruits who made the field in 2025, and every other Power-4 team had more than 37 blue-chip players taking the same. Indiana just had seven.

The broader trend is clear: programs that once couldn’t consistently land elite high school talent can now bridge the gap with experienced transfers, particularly at premium positions, using NIL resources. Indiana and Texas Tech had the fewest blue-chip players among Power 4 playoff teams, while traditional powers like Ohio State and Georgia carried more than 60 apiece.

Of course, the freshman players don’t cost a lot, but programs still pay each of them. Add them all up, and it tilts any program’s budget by a huge margin, even when those players don’t play for one or two years at least. OSU’s GM is just pointing towards a prudent financial investment, especially since the House settlement has proposed a $20 million cap and player prices are increasing by the day.

‘The market has only gone up. And even with the cap, the agents are still pushing the market as much as they possibly can,” Mark Pantoni said. “Now, having House settlement, having a cap that we’re all trying to follow the guidelines on. And then on top of that, supplement with the third-party marketing, it’s definitely more challenging in that regard.”

That financial math is what’s forcing front offices to rethink development timelines. High school recruiting is cheaper individually, but when 20–25 prospects are signed every year, many of whom won’t contribute for two seasons, millions can sit idle on the depth chart. Portal veterans cost more upfront, but they deliver immediate returns.

History suggests portal-heavy success isn’t a one-off, but it isn’t foolproof either. TCU reached the CFP title game in 2022 with just 19 blue-chip players and 23 transfers. Florida State went undefeated in 2023 with 29 transfers in major roles. Washington’s title-game roster that same year leaned heavily on transfer quarterback Michael Penix Jr. The common thread wasn’t star ratings; it was experienced production.

Still, volatility remains the risk. Portal windows are short, bidding wars escalate quickly, and chemistry can swing year to year. Even as Indiana’s blueprint gains imitators, most coaches still view elite high school recruiting as the long-term foundation, with the portal serving as a targeted accelerator.

What Indiana has proven, though, is that the old formula is no longer the only road to a championship. Experience, evaluation, and timing can now compete with recruiting rankings, and Ohio State’s willingness to study that model closely may signal the next evolution of roster building in college football.