How it works

What we track

Head coaches, coordinators, position coaches and front office staff (general managers, player personnel, recruiting and scouting directors) at the SEC, Big Ten, ACC and Big 12 schools plus Notre Dame. Their accounts are checked twice a day, morning and evening. When a coach follows someone new, it appears in the feed with the time we spotted it, which can be up to 12 hours after the actual follow.

The first time we check a coach, we record everyone they already follow without putting it in the feed. The feed only shows changes after tracking began.

Recruit and portal labels

Labels come from the player's own X bio: a class year, a position, height and weight, a high school, or a mention of the transfer portal. They're automatic, so some will be wrong, and players with empty bios get no label.

What a follow means

Not much on its own. Coaches follow players to be able to message them, and sometimes for no reason at all. The strongest sign is when several coaches on one staff follow the same player within a few days; team pages call these out as staff-wide targets. A follow is never an offer or a commitment.

How the rankings work

The rankings measure interest, not talent: how hard Power 4 staffs are chasing a player on X (American Conference follows are shown but don't count). Each player followed by at least two programs gets a score:

• 10 points for every program with a coach following him
• 6 more for every program where two or more coaches follow him
• 4 more for every program where the head coach or a coordinator follows him

There's no bonus for recent follows, so a player's rank reflects how many staffs are on him, not how recently they got there. Rising covers momentum: it ranks players by how many programs started following them in the last 7 days. Scores update after every check.

Star ratings

Stars on The Board come from coach follows, not scouting. Within each class we rank recruits by follow score (10 points per program following, 6 more where two or more coaches do, 4 more where the head coach or a coordinator does, no bonus for recent follows) and hand out stars the way the recruiting services do: a finished class gets 32 five-stars and 418 four-stars, the same counts On3 uses, phased in on the same schedule for younger classes. Three-stars run through #2,000 in a finished class, and everyone below that is a two-star.

How class rankings work

Commitments come from CollegeFootballData.com, and we match each commit to his X account. Every commit gets a follow score from who follows him right now: 10 points for each program with a coach following him, 6 more for each program where two or more coaches do, and 4 more where the head coach or a coordinator does. Unlike the player rankings, there's no bonus for recent follows. A class's total adds up all its commits' scores, so bigger classes and more sought-after commits both count. The top 15 average is the average score of a class's 15 best commits (all of them, if it has fewer), which puts the focus on quality over size.

Visit Watch

Visit Watch lists prospects that a school's recruiting staff (directors of recruiting, on-campus recruiting, recruiting coordinators and recruiting operations) started following in the last few weeks. Those are the people who set up and host visits, so their follows often come right before one. Analysts and scouting staff don't count. It's a hint, not a confirmed visit.

FLIP Watch

Once a day we look at who each committed recruit follows on X (for every commit we've matched to an account). When a commit starts following a coach or staffer we track at a different school, he goes on FLIP Watch, with the school, the coaches and when we spotted it. Two or more coaches at one school, or a head coach, marks him as hot. Recruits often follow back coaches who follow them, so a single follow is something to watch, not a flip.

Unfollows

Unfollows aren't tracked right now. The feed only shows new follows.