5 Ways College Baseball Recruiting Has Entered A New Age

Three of the top 10 college draftees in 2024—Chase Burns, Seaver King and Braden Montgomery—were transfers. Tennessee, the 2024 national champs, were relatively homegrown by modern standards, but their top reliever, one of their top three starting pitchers and their third baseman all transferred from other Division I programs.

The year before, LSU won the national title with D-I transfer Paul Skenes atop the rotation and another, Tommy White, playing third base.

Summers for coaches now are split between hitting up high school showcases, bouncing around summer college leagues (to spot talent in the transfer portal) and watching a lot of video of transfer portal targets. The addition of a third full-time assistant coach has proven to be crucial, because it has added another person to help do a job that keeps growing busier and busier.

“I probably watch more college summer ball than I ever anticipated that I’d ever watch,” Missouri State head coach Joey Hawkins said.

“Summer time is for the portal,” Austin Peay State head coach Roland Fanning said.

College recruiting is always changing, but it has changed more in the past five years than it did in the previous 15.

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1. Stability has been replaced by uncertainty

Change can be good and bad. In the case of college baseball, it has clearly been both.

The biggest bit of instability right now is the unknown. The proposed settlement in the House v. NCAA lawsuit established the framework that would likely establish the rules for the 2025-26 school year and beyond.

In that settlement, schools would be allowed to offer up to 34 full scholarships to baseball players, a dramatic jump from the 11.7 scholarships teams have been limited to for decades. But it would also cut the rosters to 34 players as well, a big drop from the current 40-player limit.

The uncertainty arises from the lack of details on many rules that would go with these and other changes. As of early October, the House settlement had not been finalized but had been tentatively approved by a federal court. If it’s not approved, no one knows what would happen next. Even if it is approved, administrators will be scrambling to adjust and adapt to changes that will be taking place less than a year from now.

“The NCAA will not make a cold, hard decision and tell us what it will be. Please just tell us,” said one head coach from a Power Four conference school.

Players have a lot more options today than they did just a decade ago. A player buried on one team’s bench can much more easily transfer elsewhere to find playing time. The under-recruited high school player can play his way to a dream school by performing in a smaller conference.

“That’s my one gripe about people who argue against the portal,” Hawkins said. “If there is a kid who wants to go try LSU or Arkansas out of high school, and he has the self-awareness to realize it’s not what’s best for him, and then he wants to play at Missouri State, that’s the point of the portal.”

Name, image and likeness rules allow players to make money. Major programs have used this to effectively expand the number of scholarships, with numerous players receiving NIL payments in addition to any scholarship money they receive.

In extreme cases, there are players who have six-figure NIL deals that help eliminate some of the risk that in the past came from turning down a significant signing bonus from pro teams as a prospective high school draftee.

“It’s changed for the better for everybody,” Fanning said. “Here’s why I say that: Prior to this, if a player didn’t make it, or if a school over-recruited, he couldn’t go to another four-year school. Sometimes he couldn’t go back to the conference.

“Now, it gives coaches and players the autonomy to go find somewhere to play.”

On the downside, the relationship-building that has long been a key part of college baseball teams has become more difficult to develop. It’s harder to develop those deep rapports for players who transfer in for one or two years compared with players who are at one school for three, four or five years.

“It’s year-to-year and free agency. Coaching tough and getting on guys? Can you do that these days? I don’t know,” said one head coach at a mid-major program. “They are more transactional relationships. The days of me going to weddings, I don’t think that exists anymore.”

2. Teams are getting older

Imagine if you created an all-star team of Rookie-level Arizona Complex League players and had them play the best team in the Frontier League, a professional, independent “partner” league, in a three-game series.

On potential and pure talent, the ACL team would top the Frontier League team. In reality, the older, more experienced and more physically mature Frontier Leaguers would probably win a series.

Physical development for players in their late teens and early 20s is significant. As one college coach put it: Bigger, stronger and more mature 21- and 22-year-olds can regularly beat more talented 19- and 20-year-olds. That has become the mantra for many schools, primarily mid-majors, but also some schools in the Power Four conferences—the Atlantic Coast, Big 12, Big Ten and Southeastern—as well.

The trend across Division I is clear, especially when it comes to hitters. Nearly 40% of at-bats last year were taken by college seniors, up nearly 10% from a decade ago. Freshman and sophomore at-bats were both down 5% apiece.

Here is how college players performed in 2024 by class:

Year	Avg.	OBP	SLG	OPS
Freshman	.262	.369	.398	.767
Sophomore	.277	.379	.445	.824
Junior	.282	.386	.453	.839
Senior	.286	.390	.464	.854

Freshmen hit a home run every 38.9 at-bats. Seniors averaged one every 27.4.

A few contributing factors may muddy these statistics. The 2024 season was the final year for many of the “Covid seniors,” who received an extra year of eligibility when the 2020 season was canceled.

Also, the MLB draft was reduced from 40 rounds in the 2010s to five rounds in 2020 and, finally, to 20 rounds since 2021.

In the 2010s, an average of 681 four-year college players were drafted and signed by MLB teams each year. From 2021 to 2024, an average of 439 four-year college players signed out of the draft. That’s an additional 243 college players a year who would have been leaving for pro ball, many of whom still have college eligibility.

With more veteran players available to college teams, the incentive to get older to get better has continued to grow.

3. The incoming class of 2025-26 will have it rough

Multiple coaches said that the incoming freshmen for the 2025-26 academic year will be the ones who suffer the most from the changes.

Though nothing is finalized yet because the House v. NCAA settlement agreement has been only tentatively approved by a U.S. district court, the expectation is that, beginning in 2025, Division I baseball teams will be limited to 34 players on the roster.

Rosters had been limited to 35 for the entirety of the 2010s, but they were expanded to unlimited numbers for 2021, the year after the pandemic, and then to 40 players for each of the next four seasons.

While the players with extra eligibility because of the pandemic have largely graduated, many teams are stuffed to the 40-player limit. A one-year transition to a 34-player roster, especially if it goes into effect as soon as the 2025 fall semester begins, as many expect, is going to force teams to tell committed recruits that they can’t come to school, as well as potentially telling current players they need to head elsewhere.

This isn’t the first time that roster sizes have been adjusted, but in 2008 when the NCAA adopted universal start dates and restrictions on the minimum size of each scholarship, it phased in those changes. With a full roster limit of 35, college teams were allowed to spread scholarships among 30 players in 2008-09 and then to 27 players from 2009-10.

By reducing the number of players with scholarships over a couple of years, it allowed teams to deal with much of that change through graduations, draft departures and normal attrition.

The expectation is that there won’t be a gradual transition this time, and there are plenty of concerns that it will lead to a lot of difficult situations.

“The class of 2025 is going to get crushed,” said one head coach.

4. A fall roster limit will change how teams recruit

Over-recruiting has been the norm for many college baseball teams. The roster limits have not taken place until the start of the spring semester, after fall ball is complete, so teams can create a “survival of the fittest” environment in fall ball.

Fall ball rosters at many schools can number 50 players or more, with the fall season being used to figure out which 40 players will make it to the actual spring roster.

For players who don’t make the cut, there won’t be many natural alternatives. Unless a player has already graduated, they cannot transfer to another D-I school mid-year. If they are a freshman or a sophomore, they can head to a junior college, and if they are an upperclassman, they can transfer to a Division II or III school, but year after year, players who thought they were getting ready to play at a top-tier school find themselves having to find somewhere else to go.

That’s why the 34-player roster limit is viewed by many coaches as the great equalizer. Allowing teams to have up to 34 full scholarships is viewed as being something that will provide large advantages for the biggest and most financially flush programs in college baseball, because most schools will not come close to offering 34 scholarships.

But the same schools that will be offering up to 34 scholarships are the ones who will most likely be most impacted by a 34-player roster limit.

“Some places want to over-recruit,” said one mid-major coach. “People are terrified that they can’t over-recruit anymore. If I have 25 hitters and 25 pitchers, I’m going to find 12 on each side of the ball. I can miss 10 times on each side.”

Being limited to 34 players on fall rosters will likely spread talent across more schools, because those six, 10 or 15 players who can’t head to a larger school are going to end up heading somewhere else where they are more likely to be key contributors.

5. Short-term thinking has taken precedence

Building a college baseball program used to be a multi-year process. When a new coach came in, he would need to assess the current roster’s talent, build the recruiting base and then adjust and continue to improve in years two and three.

If recruiting had suffered in the previous years, the diminished talent base would likely cause struggles for multiple years.

Ideally, by year three or four, the hard work would pay off when a coach’s own recruits reached their peaks, but it could even take four or five years because building a recruiting base can take time.

That timeframe seems quaint these days. The transfer portal means outgoing and incoming players can flip a roster in one summer.

Even for established programs, the approach has changed. A decade ago, it was important to find spots to play freshmen to get them acclimated to the college game. The short-term cost—even in wins and losses—would be worth it to help establish the long-term benefit of getting them ready to star in future years.

Now, because a program’s freshmen may transfer elsewhere before their sophomore or junior year, it’s less appealing to suffer short-term pain to get future gains.

“The years of the three- or four-year guy, that’s now few and far between,” said a head coach at a mid-major school. “We bring in a lot of guys. You’re building for one year. You’ll have more changes before next year.”

The changes will continue to come. Coaches and players will continue to adapt. And those who can do it best will still figure out how to build winners, but it will require being nimble.

“We’re about to find out who can coach and recruit,” Fanning said. “We are going to find out who can handle roster management.”