Yet another recruiting rating article

It has been a great week for BYU in the transfer portal. The Cougars landed commitments from Stanford brothers Bear Bachmeier and Tiger Bachmeier. In Bear, they get a quarterback who could potentially be in line to start 2026 and beyond. In Tiger, they get a wide receiver who led the PAC-12 is freshmen receiving yards before the PAC-12 died. The potential is huge.

The conversation about Bachmeier and Bachmeier committing to BYU quickly shifted to their transfer ratings on 247Sports. Bear received a rating of 85, despite signing with Stanford just a few months ago with a rating of 88. Tiger received a rating of 84 despite being a 90 just a few years ago. When ratings have that kind of disparity, the conversation obviously turns to bias against BYU and the whole evaluation process. It is a predictable and shallow conversation, but it is really hard to reconcile.

I've debated whether I should write this newsletter or not given my role covering BYU for 247Sports. But, I've decided to write it with a few important acknowledgements.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT #1: Yes, I write for 247Sports. I'm not a talent evaluator. I don't assign ratings. I'm a very small fish in an ever-growing pond, but I do exist in the pond. I don't have any sense of pride in the rating because I didn't assign any of them, but it is probably in my best interest to have a very pro-star rating stance.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT #2: I cover high school football in Utah for KSLSports Rewind. I have a definite bias towards Utah high school football. I don't think that bias will play a role in this newsletter today, but it might, so let's at least put it into the open and acknowledge that it exists.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT #3: I'm also a BYU fan. Whether BYU signs a three-star or a four-star, they're all five-stars in my heart. I want every player committed to BYU to have the highest rating possible. It helps my favorite team and, candidly, would help subscriptions skyrocket.

With those acknowledgements out of the way, we have to set the table so we're all starting from the same spot. Think back to doing proofs in 8th grade geometry. We have to have our 'given' section before we can talk about anything else.

The Givens

There are two different types of ratings on the 247Sports Network (this is the same across all recruiting networks). There is a high school rating and a transfer portal rating. Those are two independent rantings compiled by two independent groups of evaluators. Information is undoubtedly shared and overlaps between the evaluators doing each rating, but they are separate and that's important to understand.

Along those lines, there are people involved in each rating. It's not just one person, it's a whole team of people, but they are people. The same way we see in every NFL Draft, one team's War Room might have a Top 10 grade on a specific player and another team's War Room has a 3rd round grade on the same player. That's the fun of evaluations. Everyone does it a little bit differently and we all have the ability to put as much weight into the evaluators as we want. For example, I generally throw anything Mel Kiper puts out right out of the window. I tend to trust Todd McShay more than Kiper.

247Sports and the 247Sports Composite ratings are two different things. The 247Sports rating is the rating that 247 assigns a player. The Composite rating combines all recruiting networks into one rating. The intention of the Composite rating is to give a 360-degree view of how a player is viewed by everyone. Those ratings fluctuate a ton and it's simply because some networks are better at evaluating players than others. I don't mean better in terms of accuracy, either, I mean better in terms of actually performing an evaluation. Some networks just don't do it. For today's purposes, we are going to focus only on the 247Sports ratings.

Finally, I'm not going to sit here and get into the nitty gritty details of how I personally evaluate every player. I'm personally higher on some players than the networks are, and I'm less enthusiastic about others. I can disagree with individual ratings. What I want to talk about today is the notion of a macro-level bias against BYU.

(Helpful Link: For those who don't know what the ratings mean, CLICK HERE.)

High School Ratings

The Narrative: When a player commits to BYU, their rating is held back and sometimes even decreased.

The easiest way for me to tackle this narrative would be to simply say this: No it isn't.

The second-easiest way for me to tackle this narrative would be to simply say this: If BYU mattered enough to the networks to earn some level of ratings manipulation to intentionally hold them back, I'd probably drive a nicer car, live in a nicer house, and have a much more 'sports journalism' full time job.

But we're not in it for easy and you don't really care about my opinion. So, let's look to the data. We'll roll with the 2025 class for today's purposes, but the data is similar in every BYU recruiting class.

What is this chart and what does it mean? It's fairly simple. The final rating is the rating that a player holds right now. The rating at BYU commitment section is the rating they had when they committed to BYU. The initial rating is their debut rating on the network.

It's pretty easy to look at quickly and see that nobody - not one single player in the 2025 class - had their rating drop after committing to BYU. 10/23 high school players saw their rating increase after committing to BYU.

Some players saw their Composite rating drop. Why? Because more networks issued their ratings and that changes the aggregate score. But 247Sports did not decrease the rating of a single high school player after they committed to the Cougars.

The narrative just isn't true. It did not happen even one time in this class.

There were two players - Kelepi Vete and Lamason Waller - whose ratings dropped from their initial rating. The drop happened before either player committed to BYU, but the ratings did drop. Why does this happen?

Some players burst onto the scene as high school freshmen or sophomores and look like they will be major recruits. Sometimes, those players simply do not develop throughout the rest of their high school careers. As that happens, some schools back off. Remember the whole 'non-commitable scholarship offer' thing? Yes, in some cases, that's a real thing. Michigan might offer a player as a freshman, but that offer might not be available when the players tries to commit as a junior. That's recruiting and schools do it all the time.

The networks are similar. Some players get early four-star ratings and then don't develop. In those cases, ratings go down a little bit. To combat that, 247Sports has stopped giving out five-star ratings until players are getting into their junior and senior seasons. In the 2026 class, for example, there are currently only 12 players with a five-star rating. There will be about 32 five-stars by the end of the class. But only 12 have that status now. The remaining 20 will be awarded as the evaluation circuit progresses this summer.

So, two players saw their final rating drop from their initial ratings. I'm personally higher on both Waller and Vete than the 247Sports rating is, but disagreeing with a rating given after an evaluation is conducted is very different than a network intentionally punishing a player because they committed to BYU.

Transfer Portal Rankings

As discussed earlier, portal rankings are different than high school ratings. Basically, when a player hits the portal, there is a completely new evaluation performed by a completely different set of evaluators. The rubric and score definitions remain the same, but the evaluators look at players differently because they have more data points available to them.

There are some clear discrepancies between the two ratings on certain players. Tausili Akana's rating in the portal was significantly lower than his rating out of high school. I personally have Akana higher than the 85 rating that the network assigned to him, but the rating isn't completely indefensible either. Akana was initially viewed as a player who could make an immediate impact at the next level and a bonafide NFL prospect. In two years at Texas, he has seen a total of six defensive snaps. The rating out of high school might have just been a miss.

Misses happen and the portal gives a chance for a new rating based on new information. Ryan Leaf was a can't-miss NFL prospect set to rival Peyton Manning for his entire career. We know how that turned out. Misses happen at every level. Those misses are misses. Those misses make everyone question how much trust they should have in the evaluations from the people who were so wrong. But those misses are not conspiracies. They're misses.

Gentry's rating dropped considerably. A 94 out of high school was another bonafide NFL prospect. He was part of the 2020 class out of high school. Since his high school career ended in 2019, he's played 195 snaps of offensive football. With five additional years of age and three years of data points at Michigan, it's hard to come up with a four-star rating again.

These ratings don't mean that Akana and Gentry aren't good players. I think both of them will start and prove to be very good for BYU. I think both of them are still NFL prospects and will outperform the rating assigned to them. But, the ratings aren't indefensible either.

This brings us to the brothers Bachmeier. Let's start with Tiger. His rating fell from 90 to 84 after leading the PAC-12 in freshman receiving yards. How is that justified? Well, as a sophomore, he played in 12 games for Stanford and had 10 total catches. After bursting out as a freshman, he disappointed as a sophomore. The tape he put up must have shown the evaluators something.

As for Bear, he signed with Stanford in December and was rated an 88. Now he's an 85 after zero games played and practicing with the starters at Stanford during spring ball. HOW DO YOU EXPLAIN THIS MADNESS, JEFF?!

Frankly, I can't. It's a rating that I disagree with. Either we were way off a few months ago or we are way off now. Or maybe some of both. It's possible that evaluators slightly overvalued him out of high school based on the way he burst onto the scene early on and it's possible the evaluators are underrating him now.

But what I can say is that this rating isn't because he committed to BYU. There is zero supporting evidence to support that (furthermore, it was a rating assigned before he visited BYU).

Some players saw ratings increases. Other players saw decreases. But that's the case at every school, not just BYU. Georgia has 10 transfers in their 2025 class. Six of those 10 have lower portal ratings than high school ratings. Eight of Utah's 19 transfers had lower portal ratings than high school ratings. This is just the nature of portal ratings.

Harrison Taggart was rated a 90 out of high school. He was rated a 90 when he transferred from Oregon to BYU. He was rated an 86 when he left BYU to go to Cal.

In Summary...

If you want to get into a football-based discussion about why Tyler Payne should have been rated a four-star because of his ability to fit gaps from the mike linebacker spot and his projectable traits, I'm with you. I think he should have been a four-star. In fact, there were some evaluators who also believed he should have been a four-star. But others didn't so he topped out at 88. I think Payne is underrated.

If you want to get into a discussion about Akana's traits as a pass rusher and how he just needed time to gain weight in order to reach his potential, I agree. I think he's going to be a monster for BYU this season and prove that he is still the prospect Texas thought he was.

There are plenty of ratings that I don't agree with and plenty of football-based arguments to be made to support those claims.

When the claim extends beyond football though? There just isn't anything there that shows BYU commits or BYU as a whole is being treated differently than anyone else.