What’s an optimal class size for HS recruits (excluding transfers)? If you took the average of the top 10 ranked 2026 classes its 29.1 recruits. Of those 10 schools you have, largely, only top 25 ranked teams; OSU, ND, UGA, O, Bama, Texas, A&M…. Seems to be a nice correlation that infers the better schools rely on HS talent. Well, if top 25 schools have large HS class sizes, what do mid schools have in class sizes? Let’s take the classes ranked 91-100 in class ranking. As it turns out those classes have 19.9 HS recruits per school. The schools include the likes of UTEP, ECU, Cent Mich, UVa, ODU but there are outliers. Cent Mich and ODU had large class sizes that inflated the average (38 and 30, respectively) and conversely, UVa had the smallest class size of 14. To recap, in 2026 the schools with the largest class sizes were all top 25 WL programs and with lowest class sizes weren’t. 2025 was almost ditto; the top 10 team ranked schools had larger class sizes and included exactly the same top schools and the lowest 10 schools had smaller average class sizes in general (Air Force had a 65 member class size for obvious reasons making the bottom 10 average distorted). Had a lot more thinking on UVa’s rationale of smaller HS recruiting in favor of “proven talent" in the portal but it kept degenerating. Suffice it to say, if a small class size is innovative, outside the box thinking, UVa will knock it out of the park with their 2027 HS class (5 commits presently) as it and their forthcoming OV schedule stands (19 scheduled OVs). I’ll leave it to your imagination to further evaluate the HS class size correlation to success. I, for one, don’t buy the transfer portal path to success philosophy. If the ‘good ones’ of the HS recruits are going to top schools, the top portal transfers will do the same IMO. Either you can recruit or you’d better have a better eye at choosing the best of the rest. I like where VT is positioned with 7 of 10 top 10 Va recruits taking OVs. With now 91 OVs still on the schedule there’s a lot of talent there to make a 25-35 class size. I know, it's complicated. ** Edited by V333T at 5/22/2026, 7:37:26 AM