PROVO, Utah – BYU spring football is in the books and now the Cougar coaching staff is organizing the roster with an early look at its two-deep and also to see what holes they need to fill.

There will be another group of freshman players coming on campus to participate in fall camp, but BYU may not wait that long to find new talent.

The transfer portal is year-round and while the movement of talent slowed down after the 2021 season ended, expect it to pick back up once spring practices end across the country. Expect another minor wave of players looking for a new home once their own spring practics are over.

“You’re trying to create a roster that can win games, as well as just helping kids with their futures,” Tuiaki said on Unrivaled. “It’s a lot of just really being honest with the kids, giving them an opportunity to make a decision that they think is going to be best for them and then move forward from there.”

Tuiaki said during spring practice that hitting the transfer portal to fill gaps is a necessity.

“You have those discussions after the season, you have discussions after recruiting season, and you have those discussions all the time,” he said. “Recruiting is never stagnant.”

Look for BYU to add and also lose some talent in the portal over the next few months.

Do Coaches Follow Recruiting Rankings?

There are a growing number of recruiting services to evaluate players and assign the coveted star ratings. Those four-and-five-star grades get fanbases excited and are used throughout an athlete’s college career and even follow them through the NFL, especially if a player was lowly rated and ended up being an All-Pro player.

One intriguing question is how much do college programs use those services in their recruiting process.

“I trust the way that I evaluate, I trust my own instincts. There are 50 million things that go into recruiting a person. It’s not just film, it’s just fit, and there are different things,” Tuiaki said. “I don’t look at it at all like 0%, but I know that it is kind of something that people look at.

“I’m not always 100% correct, but neither is anybody else. Everybody’s got to project what they think and then move and roll with it. I guess I’m doing the same as everybody else, which is I have my own ranking and projection, and then I go from there.”

Every coach and staff have their way of recruiting and evaluating players.

If any staff uses only recruiting services to do the work for them, that college team will fail in a spectacular fashion, and BYU’s Tuiaki has no intention of using other people’s evaluations to build his Cougar defense.

Tune into Unrivaled every Monday through Friday, 3-7 p .m. on 1280 The Zone and 97.5 FM or subscribe to the podcast. Also, download the all-new KSL Sports app on iOS or Android.

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