C.J. Moore’s Transfer Highlights Importance of Recruiting a Lot of Stars

C.J. Moore’s announcement this week that he intends to transfer became a lightning rod in OSU world. Loads of commentary about what this means for OSU’s program and a bit of look-back on how much optimism there was around Moore coming into college.

He was the No. 1 player in a 2018 class that included Spencer Sanders and Kolby Harvell-Peel. Much was expected, but he never delivered in his two years in Stillwater. He played in both of them (barely) but never accumulated even triple-digits in receiving yards. Now he’s gone.

Something kept popping up as I was thinking and writing about some of this stuff. OSU’s last five classes have featured a lot of transfers at the top of each class. With the invention of the transfer portal, this is actually where you would expect transfers to come from. That is, the best talent doesn’t fit at a school for whatever reason and decides to move on. These are the players for whom a transfer makes the most sense. I guess you could transfer from OSU to Arkansas (or wherever) if you’re a two-star guy not getting playing time, but why would you? If you’re C.J. Moore, though, there are many reasons.

Nobody I know has compared transfer rates based on player rating are coming into school (does Clemson lose a higher percentage of four-stars than Michigan? What is the percentage of losing five-stars at OSU?*), and it’s difficult to figure out a normalized number as all of this continues to change.

*That’s a trick question.

So all we have to go on is what’s happened at OSU. So let’s dive into OSU’s top five players of the last five classes (25 total players) and their last school played for.

So OSU has lost nine of its top 25 over the last five years (so far), which means the hit rate is 65 percent. But who of this list has been an impact player? Carson, Bundage, Rodarius, Tylan, Chuba, Sanders and Ford. That’s probably the list. So the actual hit rate in terms of mega-impact players is 28 percent (of these 25 guys).

And this is the part I want to talk about. Because I think some people will look at all the transfers and all the misses and say, See, you don’t recruit big talent because if they don’t play, they leave. You get guys who will work hard and stay all four years.

Sure, depth can be an issue, and OSU needs some help at wideout in the post-Tylan era. But this is actually exactly why you recruit top talent. Because even though the majority of these top-five guys haven’t panned out (with a few TBD), the hits are titanic hits.

You would trade the other 16 for one Chuba or one Tylan, and you get both of them. The point is not that top talent always pans out, it certainly does not. The point is that you have no idea which of the top talent will pan out, so you take as much top talent as possible (this is the entire goal of recruiting well) and play the hits (literally) for the next three or four years.

Maybe this is obvious to everyone and there’s no reason for me to be here, but I feel like every time somebody like Moore leaves or Greenwood transfers, we put KHP or James Washington on a pedestal and say, Recruit these guys. They never say a word. They work hard. They’re awesome. They’re also extremely rare. The list I highlighted above? That’s what a normal hit list in FBS looks like. I think sometimes we think that because Chuba and Tylan came to OSU, they weren’t stars in high school. Tylan had offers from OU, Michigan and Notre Dame. Chuba from Alabama, Auburn, Georgia and Oregon.

Moore’s transfer really highlighted for me that it does not matter who leaves. All that matters is that you have a handful of program-changers still staying. Would you love to bat 1.000 on your four-star guys (which is what a lot of these were)? Sure. But you can only play 11 guys at once, and a transfer (or even 15 transfers) is not proof that you shouldn’t keep swinging. In fact, as OSU’s elite triumvirate — the law firm of Sanders, Hubbard and Wallace — should show, it’s proof that you should do exactly the opposite.