LF, thanks for the lengthy and thoughtful reply. I mostly agree and you are probably right. My theory probably doesn’t even need to be enacted to get most of these “goy brained” (I like the term) coaches to go along with White replacement willingly.
I will however push back a little. The top blue blood programs have access to the top 5 and 4 star recruits, who are overwhelmingly black. It makes sense that those programs match the demographics pushed by the crooked “scouting agencies”. However a bottom rung power 5 or mid majors aren’t getting those guys (as we’ve discussed often too). Unless by some miracle a top recruit is a local guy who wants to “stay home”. So in this example, Leipold has to make the conscious decision to use 4th or 5th tier blacks over Whites who have excelled at a high level from local states (good ratings or other). Since he dominated with mostly White teams for so long he can’t be a total cuck / dunce in this regard, can he? Therefore, this is where I would posit that some other force is at play.
And a final thought, Kansas would be terrified to schedule North Dakota State. The one time they did 16 years ago, they lost at home. If they played them every season, they’d probably lose 70% of the time. So they would have to know they can get superior players scouting the same territory that NDST does, but they won’t do it. Maybe that is the psychosis you mention?
PS - Kansas’ brief period of football success also coincided with the much higher White totals from our earlier days of tracking. Huge fatman Mark Mangino’s run culminated with a 12-1 season and a #2 ranking in the country. 2 years later he was forced out / fired after allegations of “verbal abuse”. He never had another head coaching position. Weird, huh?!
Freethinker, I read your comments this morning and wanted to do my best to give out a clear logical response. At the surface level I honestly have no precise, foolproof response I can state with 100% certainty. I think that these past 6 years have really awakened me to how effective and demoralizing propaganda can be to a population. Don started this site 22 years ago and really laid out the template for what is going on by making astute observations and questioning the narrative and agenda that had been pushed for 40 or years at the time. So we are at 60+ years (I'd actually say 80 to 90 if you count baseball integration or the Berlin Olympics in 1936). So we have decades of propaganda, lies, ancedotes, skewing measurables, using language to subversively deride, mock and undermine White Christian Western society. White people have been deracinated and racially neutered.
The countless posts many CF members have made over the years calling out instances of belittling or mocking White athleticism in articles, live sports broadcasts and then parroted by DWFs and anti-White "nons" are well documented and undisputed proof of systemic and kosher discrimination against Whites. I think generation after generation of Whites that have lived through the breakdown of America and the build up of Amerika 2.0 take the sports propaganda hook line and sinker. It's gospel to them, coaches like Leipold included. Most people cannot comprehend another possibility because it defies their belief system, are afraid to call it out (which many are) or simply do not care because they see sports as compromised and have zero interest (this is the "sportsball" crowd). This site and all the members over the years are the only ones that dare question the "conventional wisdom" of the caste system.
With that said I feel that Leipold leans into the first group mentioned above - they just can't comprehend anything but what the caste system offers. Every rung he has climbed in the coaching ladder has fielded an increasingly black team. This is pretty much par for the course over the past 15 or so years in the sport - others guilty of this sin include Butch Davis, Brian Kelly, Chip Kelly, Dave Doeren, Bryan Harsin off the top of my head. This doesn't include the current younger generation of coaches from Lincoln Riley on down - all bow to the caste system.
I also put chatgpt through it's paces just to give a synopsis of how recruiting has changed over the past 20 or so years. Once again this site have been calling this all out for decades. It's a wordy explanation but certainly gives some context into why the demographics are trending negatively despite black birth rates remaining steady or dropping.
Absolutely. The easiest way to understand the last ~20–25 years is that college football recruiting went from
a relationship-driven, relatively local scouting business into a national, data-driven, media-heavy talent marketplace—and then, after 2021, into something increasingly resembling professional roster acquisition.
The recruiting services and camps/academies were a huge part of that transition.
The short version
Around
2000–2005, a recruit's visibility depended heavily on his high school reputation, regional camps, newspaper coverage, and whether college coaches personally found him. Recruiting rankings existed, but they weren't yet the central language of the sport.
By
2010, sites such as Rivals, Scout, ESPN and later 247Sports had created a national marketplace for prospects. A kid could go from being "the best player in his county" to being a nationally ranked four- or five-star recruit because a service had evaluated him at a camp or watched his film.
By
2015–2020, camps, 7-on-7, private training, recruiting services, social media and showcase events had become an interconnected ecosystem. A recruit wasn't simply being
discovered anymore; he was increasingly
building a recruiting profile.
And since
2021, the distinction between "recruiting" and "roster management" has blurred dramatically. NIL, the transfer portal and much more fluid movement between schools mean that high-school recruiting is now only one piece of roster construction. The portal launched in 2018, and the NCAA describes it as a mechanism that allows athletes to make their interest in transferring known to schools.
1. 2000–2005: The old system starts giving way
Twenty-five years ago, recruiting was still much more
coach/scout driven.
A college staff would have:
- high-school coaches they trusted
- regional recruiting territories
- handwritten or mailed information
- VHS/DVD game film
- in-person evaluations
- camps and combines
- relationships with prominent high-school programs
- their own internal rankings
There were recruiting publications and services—
Rivals was founded in 1998, for example—but the internet had not yet completely transformed the process.
The interesting thing is that we can actually see the transition happening in the historical data.
Rivals' database goes back to the
2002 recruiting class, and by then there were already multiple competing evaluators. A 2002 comparison, for example, shows Rivals and ESPN assigning substantially different evaluations to some prospects.
There was also an emerging concept of a
composite consensus: don't trust one evaluator; aggregate several.
That's important because it established a principle that still dominates recruiting today:
The recruit isn't merely what a college coach thinks he is. He's also what the recruiting industry thinks he is.
That was a profound change.
2. Recruiting services turned scouting into a national product
This is probably the single biggest change you're asking about.
Before the recruiting-service explosion, evaluation was largely
private information.
A coach might know:
"There's a 6-foot-4 defensive end in Georgia who is really good."
But a national recruiting service could turn that into:
John Smith — 5-star — No. 7 nationally — No. 2 DE — 97.8 rating
Suddenly everybody knew.
And that created a feedback loop.
The cycle became:
Scout → ranking → publicity → more coaches notice player → more offers → more publicity → player attends bigger camps → ranking gets revised → even more attention
The ranking itself became part of the recruiting process.
That is a major distinction from 20 years ago.
The recruiting services weren't simply
reporting recruiting anymore. They were increasingly
creating the marketplace in which recruiting happened.
3. Stars became a shorthand for talent
The star system also solved a problem for fans and coaches.
There are thousands of FBS prospects. Nobody can personally evaluate all of them.
So:
5-star = presumed elite
4-star = high-level Power-conference prospect
3-star = legitimate FBS prospect
became an extremely useful shorthand.
But there's an important caveat:
Stars are not measurements of ability.
They're predictions/evaluations.
And that's where the relationship between services and college programs gets fascinating.
College coaches might say:
"He's a 3-star to Rivals, but he's a 4-star player to us."
That was—and remains—perfectly possible.
In fact, some of the most interesting recruiting stories have involved players who were
under-ranked by the services and subsequently outperformed their recruiting profile.
Mississippi State's historical data illustrates the point: its 2002–18 classes contained plenty of players who weren't highly rated nationally, while some of the program's most important players didn't fit the conventional recruiting-star profile.
The services therefore became both
extremely useful and inherently imperfect.
4. Camps changed from instruction into evaluation
This is where camps become especially important.
Historically, a camp was essentially:
It gradually became:
"Come prove how good you are."
And eventually:
"Come prove how good you are in front of the people who control your recruiting ranking."
The NCAA itself acknowledged this evolution. In 2016, the NCAA said camps and clinics had historically been used primarily for instruction and revenue, but had increasingly become
recruiting tools. It also noted that a 2008 rule preventing FBS coaches from evaluating prospects at live nonscholastic football activities had actually increased pressure to use camps to identify talent.
That is a really important piece of the story.
Camps solved two problems simultaneously:
For coaches:
- See athletes in person
- Compare them against other prospects
- Test measurable traits
- Watch them compete
- Get a feel for competitiveness and personality
For recruiting services:
- Find prospects
- Generate rankings
- Generate content
- Generate video
- Generate measurable data
- Create events that fans would follow
And then there was another important development:
Best-on-best competition.
The camp evolved from:
"Can you run a 4.6?"
to:
"Can you run a 4.6 while competing against other elite prospects?"
That's much more informative.
5. Elite camps became their own ecosystem
The
Elite 11 is probably the clearest example.
Elite 11 began in 1999 as a quarterback competition/camp and is still operating today. Its historical database shows quarterbacks from the 2000 event who went on to major college and NFL careers, including Matt Leinart, Kyle Orton, Derek Anderson and others.
That creates an interesting dynamic:
The camp becomes a credential.
Being invited to Elite 11 isn't merely an opportunity to train.
It's evidence that:
"The football industry considers me one of the best quarterbacks in my class."
And then the camp itself generates more evidence.
The same thing happened with events like
The Opening, which Nike launched in 2011. Nike describes the event as having become one of the country's premier elite recruiting competitions, combining testing, position work, 1-on-1s and 7-on-7. The event distributed data and video to major college programs and attracted the major recruiting sites.
That is essentially a
talent marketplace convention.
Everybody is in the same place:
- prospects
- college coaches
- recruiting analysts
- media
- trainers
- sponsors
- equipment companies
- parents
- agents/representatives increasingly around the edges
6. 7-on-7 was enormously important
I'd put
7-on-7 alongside recruiting services as one of the biggest structural changes.
It created an offseason football ecosystem where skill players could repeatedly compete against other elite players.
That had several consequences.
It increased exposure.
A talented receiver in a small-town program might not have been seen very often.
Now he could play:
spring 7-on-7 → regional tournament → national tournament → recruiting camp → showcase
and potentially be seen by dozens of evaluators.
It accelerated recruiting.
A sophomore could become a nationally known prospect before playing his junior season.
It changed what was evaluated.
7-on-7 disproportionately showcases:
- quarterbacks
- wide receivers
- defensive backs
- route running
- coverage
- speed
- spatial awareness
It doesn't tell you everything about football.
But it gives evaluators an incredibly convenient environment for comparing certain skills.
7. Academies changed the meaning of "high school football"
This is another huge shift.
The rise of places like
IMG Academy created something that didn't really exist at the same scale before:
A national football-development pipeline inside a school environment.
IMG's football program didn't really emerge until the early 2010s, but it rapidly became a major recruiting destination. IMG reported that more than 250 coaches from over 90 college programs visited its campus during the 2016–17 academic year.
That's remarkable.
Instead of a college coach traveling around the country to find 20 different prospects, a school like IMG could effectively become a
concentrated recruiting market.
You could walk into one campus and see:
- elite quarterback
- elite receiver
- elite offensive lineman
- elite linebacker
- elite corner
- elite defensive lineman
all practicing together.
That makes the academy extremely valuable to colleges.
8. Academies also changed player development
There's a second side to this.
An elite academy isn't just saying:
"We're going to get you recruited."
It's saying:
"We're going to turn you into the kind of player who gets recruited."
That means:
- strength training
- speed training
- position-specific coaching
- nutrition
- recovery
- film study
- exposure
- professional-style facilities
- competition against elite players
IMG is a particularly good example of this. Its football program became nationally prominent remarkably quickly, and by 2023 it reported more than 130 Division I alumni on college rosters.
So the ecosystem increasingly became:
high school → trainer/academy → camp → recruiting service → college
rather than simply:
high school → college
9. Then came Hudl and the video revolution
This might actually be the most democratizing change.
In the early 2000s:
No film = difficult to evaluate.
By the 2010s:
Every serious prospect had a digital highlight reel.
And then full-game video became increasingly accessible.
That meant a coach in California could evaluate a player in Connecticut without physically seeing him play.
And it changed the role of recruiting services too.
Instead of sending somebody to watch every game, an evaluator could:
- watch film
- identify a prospect
- request more film
- attend a camp
- update his ranking
That massively expanded the geographic reach of recruiting.
10. Social media then removed another layer of friction
By the mid-2010s, recruiting became almost absurdly immediate.
Twitter/X, Instagram and other platforms allowed:
player ↔ coach
to happen almost directly.
A 2015 Sports Illustrated piece described Twitter DMs and Instagram posts replacing many of the traditional forms of recruiting communication.
Think about what that means.
In 2003, a recruit might have had:
high-school coach → college recruiter → college coach
By 2015:
recruit → Twitter → position coach → recruiting coordinator → head coach
And everybody could see it.
That created a
public recruiting theater.
Commitment graphics.
Offer announcements.
"Blessed to receive an offer from..."
Top-10 lists.
Visit photos.
Recruiting rankings.
Crystal-ball predictions.
It made recruiting into content.
And content created more recruiting.
11. The recruiting services and camps became mutually dependent
This is the part I think is most interesting.
The relationship became almost symbiotic.
Camps need recruiting services because:
They need exposure.
Recruiting services need camps because:
They need information.
Players need both because:
They need exposure and validation.
Colleges need both because:
They need access to prospects and independent information.
So you get a four-sided ecosystem:
PLAYER ↔ CAMP/SHOWCASE ↔ RECRUITING SERVICE ↔ COLLEGE
And increasingly, everyone benefits financially or professionally from having more activity in the ecosystem.
12. The NCAA tried to regulate this—and often accidentally accelerated it
This is a fascinating subplot.
The NCAA repeatedly tried to prevent recruiting from becoming an arms race.
But restrictions sometimes produced unintended consequences.
The 2008 rule prohibiting FBS coaches from evaluating prospects at live nonscholastic football activities is a good example. The NCAA later acknowledged that the rule may actually have
increased the importance of camps, because coaches needed other places to evaluate players.
Then in 2017, the NCAA adopted a broader recruiting model that:
- expanded official-visit opportunities
- created an early signing period
- limited FBS camp participation to 10 days in June/July
- allowed recruiting conversations at camps
- tried to tie recruiting more closely to high schools.
In other words, the NCAA increasingly recognized:
Recruiting had become an industry of its own.
13. Early recruiting became a major consequence
One of the biggest changes from 2005 to 2025 is
how young the process became.
A kid could go from:
unknown sophomore
to
national recruit
in a matter of months.
And once recruiting rankings became important, schools had incentives to identify players early.
That creates a self-reinforcing cycle:
early offer → player gets attention → recruiting services rank player → more schools offer → player becomes nationally known
It also creates the opposite problem:
If you're not identified early, you can feel like you're falling behind.
That helped fuel the explosion of:
- private training
- camps
- combines
- 7-on-7
- recruiting consultants
- recruiting platforms
- showcase events
- academies
Parents increasingly had the feeling that:
"If my kid isn't attending these events, he's invisible."
Sometimes that's true.
Sometimes it's marketing.
Usually it's somewhere in between.
14. The "camp circuit" became almost a parallel football season
By the late 2010s, elite prospects could spend their offseason going through something like:
January/February: training
↓
March: regional 7-on-7
↓
April: recruiting camp
↓
May: more showcases
↓
June: college camps
↓
July: national showcases/7-on-7
↓
August: high-school season
That's fundamentally different from 2000.
The player's development and recruiting were becoming
year-round.
15. But there was a downside: recruiting started rewarding "camp traits"
This is where the system gets controversial.
Some skills are extremely easy to measure in a camp:
- 40 time
- shuttle
- vertical
- arm strength
- size
- explosiveness
- one-on-one ability
Other things are much harder:
- processing
- toughness
- blocking
- tackling
- leadership
- consistency
- football intelligence
- playing through adversity
- scheme fit
So the recruiting ecosystem sometimes creates a bias toward:
"What can we measure quickly?"
rather than:
"What ultimately makes this kid a great football player?"
This is one reason college staffs have always emphasized that their own evaluation matters more than the stars.
16. The recruiting rankings also became self-fulfilling
This is another subtle effect.
Suppose a prospect receives:
- Alabama offer
- Georgia offer
- Ohio State offer
- Texas offer
A recruiting service sees that and thinks:
"Clearly the elite programs think he's good."
So his ranking rises.
Then other programs see:
So they recruit him.
Then fans see:
And suddenly the recruiting ranking itself has become evidence.
That's not necessarily bad. Elite programs are pretty good talent evaluators.
But it creates a
feedback loop between college evaluation and media evaluation.
17. 2018–2020: The portal starts changing the whole equation
The transfer portal launched in October 2018.
Initially, people thought of it mainly as a mechanism for transferring.
But strategically, it eventually changed recruiting itself.
Why?
Because a college coach now had another way to acquire talent.
Instead of asking:
"Which 17-year-old do we need to sign?"
the question became:
"Do we develop a freshman for three years, or go find a 21-year-old who has already played college football?"
That changed the value proposition of high-school recruiting.
18. 2021–present: NIL blows up the old model
NIL was another structural break.
The NCAA now allows athletes to receive compensation for use of their name, image and likeness, including social media, appearances and other commercial activities.
That means recruiting increasingly involves not only:
football + academics + relationships
but also:
brand + marketability + NIL opportunities + roster fit + transfer possibilities
And that's why I wouldn't describe 2026 recruiting as simply "college football recruiting."
It's really:
college football talent acquisition.
That encompasses:
- high-school recruits
- transfers
- junior-college players
- international prospects
- NIL
- development
- retention
19. And that changes the role of recruiting services
The services have evolved accordingly.
Twenty years ago, their primary product was essentially:
"Who are the best high-school football players?"
Today, their value proposition is much broader:
"Where is the talent, how good is it, how does it project, and how can everyone in this ecosystem access it?"
That's why companies such as NCSA and SportsRecruits increasingly look more like
recruiting technology platforms than old-school scouting publications.
NCSA, founded in 2000, says it has facilitated hundreds of thousands of college commitments and now connects athletes and coaches through technology, evaluation, education and recruiting tools. IMG Academy acquired SportsRecruits in 2025, further illustrating how recruiting services, training organizations and technology platforms are converging.
20. So what role did camps and academies ultimately play?
I'd divide their influence into
five major functions.
1. Discovery
They helped uncover players who weren't already known.
2. Validation
They gave recruiting services a place to test their evaluations.
3. Development
They increasingly taught players the skills necessary to succeed at the next level.
4. Exposure
They brought players into the field of view of college coaches.
5. Networking
They created relationships between:
- players
- parents
- coaches
- trainers
- recruiting analysts
- college coaches
- academies
And the last one may be the most important.
The really big historical shift
If I had to reduce the entire 20-year evolution to one diagram, I'd put it this way:
~2000
High school coach → college coach
The relationship was the primary currency.
~2005
High school → recruiting service → college
Information becomes more national.
~2010
High school → camps/combines → recruiting services → college
Evaluation becomes standardized.
~2015
High school → camps + 7-on-7 + social media + video → recruiting services → college
Recruiting becomes a media ecosystem.
~2020
High school + academies + 7-on-7 + services + social media + camps → college
The player increasingly manages his own recruiting brand.
~2026
High school + portal + NIL + academies + services + analytics + social media + camps → roster
Recruiting becomes
roster construction.
And there's one really important irony
The recruiting industry was originally supposed to
reduce uncertainty.
A recruiting service says:
"We watched this player. He's a four-star."
A camp says:
A ranking says:
"Here's where he stands nationally."
A video says:
"Here's what he looks like."
A database says:
"Here's every offer he's received."
So you might think the modern system would make recruiting more objective.
In some ways it absolutely has.
But it has also created
more information, more competition and more incentives to manipulate the information.
A 17-year-old isn't simply playing football anymore. He's potentially managing:
- a recruiting ranking
- a social-media presence
- a highlight reel
- camp performances
- 7-on-7 exposure
- offers
- visits
- NIL opportunities
- relationships with coaches
- his public commitment timeline
That's an enormous transformation from the early 2000s.
And it explains why recruiting today can feel less like
scouting high-school football players and more like
an organized talent marketplace.
One last development worth watching
The NCAA is still changing the rules around official visits and roster acquisition. In 2024, the NCAA temporarily suspended the FBS institutional limit on official visits, citing the changing environment and transfer-related changes; more recent legislation has continued to alter those limits.
So even the
mechanics of recruiting are still evolving.
I enjoyed the Mangino years and what he did at KU was remarkable considering how bad of a program they were before and since.
