First, this already is professional football sponsored by the nation’s largest universities. The only thing forcing these players to even play “college football” is the NFL draft rule that entrants must be age 21 or be 3 years post-high school.
Second, I would encourage everyone to reconsider the value of high school recruiting at all. Since this is now a true monetary investment in talent, one must consider both the expected return and the RISK for each player (talent) you bring into your program.
And how do you reduce or manage the risk of any investment? You don’t invest in things that are LESS LIKELY to produce your expected return. In recruiting terms, that means bringing PROVEN productive players (portal) into your program whenever possible, and not bringing in more speculative / risky players (high schoolers).
I think you’ll soon see a huge bi-furcation in college football between the major P2 schools who largely source their talent from the Portal, and the lesser P4 and G5 schools who rely on high school recruiting for their talent. Effectively, you’ll have a minor league and a major league within college football. The Minor league takes high schools recruits and develops players for a year or two, and then the Major league teams grab these proven, developed-but-not-yet-finished players from the Minors through the Portal.
The exception will be those truly elite high school players who can contribute to winning for a Major league program from day one out of high school. In other words, the true bluest chips. These elite high schoolers now have agents taking bids from colleges and will place their clients (recruits) with the best combination of immediate playing time and highest bid. It’s effectively now an auctioning process. Winning is secondary to the agent & recruit when the primary goal is to get to the NFL draft as quickly and as well-prepared as possible, while maximizing your NIL earnings along the way.
I’m not sure that we aren’t already witnessing this change with Sark / Texas in this 2025 recruiting class and particularly so over the next few days and weeks. I think Sark is deep sea fishing for only the bluest chips out of high school who project to contribute at Texas immediately (Justus Terry, J.Hilson, J.Ffrench, et al).
But once the Portal opens, I expect Sark and Texas to grab some huge impact players from other P4 and G5 programs to fill immediate impact needs on the depth chart for 2025 (this is effectively calling up proven college productive players from the Minors to the Majors).
We will have de-facto separation between the truly elite P2 programs, and all other programs in college football. One is just a talent farm system (Minors) to the other (Majors)
Their may be positional exceptions where in-house, longer term development makes sense to source from the high schools (OL, for example) since these players are often developed more so than true athletic freaks (with a few elite OTs being the exceptions). But, by and large, why not take an I.Bond into your WR line-up, A. Makuba into your secondary, J.Lole into your DL and not waste valuable resources on non-elite high schoolers who have a much higher washout rate?