Two staffs open the January window with the same list.
Three years of high school offers. The same names, the same film, mostly the same reads.
One of them decided back in September where it would look past that list, and who makes the call when the window compresses to days.
The other is deciding in January.
Same list. Different season.
This week's read
Ask five staffs how they scout the portal and you can get five answers. Cody Cater hears all five. He is UpNext's COO, a former Wake Forest safety, and he sits on calls with programs and agencies nearly every day.
"Some will tell you, I scroll through Twitter and I just try and find players that break out," he says. "Some will actually fully break it down for you." Division level tells you nothing about which staff you are talking to. "It's completely all over the map, and it doesn't matter what division level you are."
Underneath the variety, everybody starts in the same place.
They start with the high school players that they've offered in the last three years, and that is where their initial watch list comes from.
"Every single team reverts back [to the same starting point], from all the way at the top of the national championship down to JUCO," he says.
So the baseline is cheap, and it is worth exactly what everyone else's is worth. The separation is what a staff settles before the window opens: where it looks past that list, who owns which read, and whether the plan survives a bad season.
That last one is the tell.
The ones that have a good season are happy with the process they had and are going to do it again and keep doing it until they don't.
Win and nobody questions the board. Lose twice and the board gets torched. Neither one is a process.
On UpNext the baseline stops being work. 300+ programs, 750+ coaches, 140,000+ athletes and 30+ certified agencies operate on one verified network. Every agency is vetted and certified before it earns a verified profile, and that profile ties each agent to the athletes they actually represent, so pulling the list and seeing who holds which relationship is a lookup. You still design the edge yourself. What comes back is the weeks you were spending on the part everybody already has.
The market moved
Every baseline list in the country changed on Friday. On July 31, U.S. District Judge Charlotte Sweeney granted a class-wide injunction in the fifth-year case out of Colorado, making Class of 2022 athletes who already used four years eligible to come back for a fifth. Sunday night she narrowed it: those players still have to be under 24, still cannot have signed a pro contract, still have to use the transfer windows, and schools are still bound by House roster limits and the revenue-share cap. The NCAA has appealed. So what: the watch list moved under every staff in the sport four days before camp. Most Power Four programs CBS Sports reached had three or fewer players who would even qualify. Knowing your three took a phone call if you keep a ledger, and a week of reconstruction if you do not.
Washington moved too, and it moved on money. Last week we told you the agent bill was stalled and the market was not waiting on Washington. On July 31 the Big Ten and SEC voted to support the Protect College Sports Act after negotiating with Senators Ted Cruz, Maria Cantwell and Eric Schmitt. What the conferences got was a harder cap with more room under it: associated-entity money counted and vetted, plus a retention pool and non-revenue NIL money on top of the $21.3 million revenue-share figure, up to roughly $49 million per school. Majority Leader John Thune is expected to put it on the floor before the recess. So what: the ceiling on what a program can spend roughly doubles, and every dollar of it lands on the part of the plan you decide in September.
From the field
Heavy week of program calls, and the same things kept surfacing.
The ledger is a spreadsheet. Staffs are paying for tools and still keeping the part that actually decides things, who liked which player and who signs off, in a hand-built sheet beside them. Below the levels with a dedicated GM, the person running the board is not the person who approves it, and almost nobody has written down how that handoff works. The ledger exists at every program we talked to. It is just improvised.
The bigger agencies are asking for the numbers. They want verified compensation and availability data flowing into the system they already built. The shops that run like programs already keep a ledger, and they are protective of it.
And Nashville. Most of our team is at the Personnel and Recruiting Symposium this week, working the booth instead of pre-booked demos, since most of the market is in the building anyway. Come find us. The full report goes in next week's issue.
The Toolbox
The Window Plan, the four moves in order.
The Baseline. Three years of high school offers. Every team's list starts here, which is exactly why it is not an edge.
The Edge. Settle before the window where you look past the baseline. Which conferences you mine, which levels you shop, which agency lists you pull, which positions you refuse to fill late.
The Ledger. One place where every evaluator's read lives, and a decision path the whole staff knows before the window compresses to days.
The Hold. Change the process on evidence. Never on a season.
Operating rule: if the process changes every time you lose, it was never a process.
The worked examples for all four, and the version of this ladder that runs on the agency side of the table, are in The Window Plan.
The Trusted Takeaway
The baseline is cheap and everybody has it. What a staff decides in September is the only part of January it actually owns.