In modern college football, it's nearly impossible to keep a steady stream of talent pumping through your program. Instead, even the best programs dip into the portal market each year. It’s not about hoarding talent; it’s about allocating the resources you have on that current year’s team because the future is hard to ensure.
Particularly when your head coach is on the hottest seat in the country.
Florida State general manager John Garrett, who was hired away from Duke this offseason to oversee roster management in Tallahassee, understands this reality. How could he not, with Florida State’s slow start in the NIL era leaving the Seminoles far behind the programs they believe should be peers?
He just may not be the right person to deliver the message.
John Garrett’s top-heavy roster-building approach is the right one
Garrett spoke with Noles247’s Kolby Crawford on Monday, two days before Florida State opens fall camp for the 2026 season, and explained his top-heavy approach to roster construction:
“It’s important to make allocation for your players who play a lot in the game,” Garrett explained with a heavy dose of facial expressions and a borderline condescending smirk. “It’s a 105,” he said of the roster, “there’s 11 starters on offense and 11 starters on defense. That’s 22. Times two, two-deep,” he continued his math equation, “that’s 44.”
Florida State GM John Garrett talks his roster resource allocation strategy pic.twitter.com/URfRIzTWHX
— Kolby Crawford (@kolby_crawford) July 27, 2026
The logic of it makes sense. In the past, programs had the luxury of building for the future, and you certainly don’t want to abandon high school recruiting; that’s what got Mike Norvell into this mess to begin with after hitting it big in the portal in 2023. But you can’t play the game the same way you used to when Jimbo Fisher won his national championship in 2013.
Especially considering the urgency with which FSU needs to deliver a winning season, Garrett is right to think primarily about the 44 or so players who will actually see the field. That’s not a bad strategy for any program considering the arms race isn’t slowing down.
For much of college football history, the entire idea was to stack your roster as deeply as you could through recruiting and hoard talent all the way down your depth chart. For much of the ‘Saban era’ just prior to the Big Ten’s rise in the NIL and Transfer Portal era, Alabama, Clemson, and eventually Georgia dominated the sport with by far the deepest roster in the country.
At its peak, Alabama’s second-team may have finished as the No. 2 team in the country. Then, suddenly, the portal gave those talented players with no playing time a path to starting roles elsewhere, and NIL gave other programs a chance to attract them. Talent spread and the top of the sport flattened.
Now, a few years into the NIL and two years into the revenue-sharing era, programs like Texas, Texas Tech, Texas A&M, and Ohio State are spending upwards of $40 or even $50 million on their roster. Yet, they still don’t have the same depth that Alabama did through the 2010s or that Georgia built for its back-to-back titles in the early 2020s. That doesn’t exist anymore and will probably never exist again.
Those programs recruit at a high level and develop talent through the program. But those high-level recruits are playing earlier than ever before, and the players they leapfrog on the depth chart are heading out the door for better opportunities and a bigger payday.
Even just this year, in his first recruiting cycle, one that has been complicated by Norvell's uncertain future, Garrett has prioritized quality over quantity. In 2026, FSU took 34 high schoolers. So far, the Noles have just 17 commits, and it's unlikely that it grows much bigger, if it does at all.
John Garrett’s public persona needs some work if he’s going to lead a powerhouse program
However, while it hasn’t circulated heavily, Garrett is being lampooned by the FSU fans in the replies to Crawford’s post. To me, that has everything to do with his demeanor and nothing to do with the message he’s delivering.
He might be the right person to turn the program back around. It’s too early to determine that. But he’ll do it behind closed doors with sharp evaluations on overlooked high school recruits and intelligent bets on the portal market. Not by giving interviews to inspire faith in his vision, because this certainly isn’t going to help his cause on that front.
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