Five Takeaways: Initial 2025 Rankings
In this article:
After giving the rankings a week to sit, it’s time to go in-depth on the process behind the most recent iteration. 2025s — Rising sophomores, many of whom have not yet even seen the field as varsity players — are a tricky group to scout. That being said, there’s a method to our madness and we’ll break it down here. There’s an elephant in the room though and I’ll address it right away.
1. Sometimes our system just doesn’t work the way we’d like
I love the backend of our website. It’s user-friendly and easy to navigate throughout the year (Not just at rankings updates). That being said, we occasionally run into the issue of trying to edit simultaneously. When that happens, it’s anyone’s guess as to what actually gets saved. The one time neither Ed Brooks nor I double checked to make sure everything was correct is the one time it wasn’t. So yes, we have a couple of issues. Namely, our top offensive tackle, David Sanders Jr., is listed twice. We’ll fix it at the end of the summer.
There are also a few guys whose rankings are not perfectly accurate to what we wanted. We’ve already adjusted them on the backend and those will go live at the end of the summer. I’ll discuss a few of the guys I would have higher or lower on our list later, but it’s important to remember that the difference between 1 and 10 at this point is small. We have G5 grades at minimum on all 10 of our ranked 2025s, so we expect big things from them over the next few years.
We’re still a fledgling company, still less than two years old in North Carolina, and a lot of the work is done by about half a dozen people. Mistakes happen, and we always want to be honest when they do.
2. The “Dudes” of the 2025 Class
Any time we rank players this early, there are guys we think are going Power Five and the guys we know are going Power Five. Every class has it’s group of 5-10 headliners. Typically, we know who 75 percent of those headliners are going to be by the time they enter their sophomore seasons. While the summer between freshman and sophomore year is the prime season for these top guys to make themselves known, there are a handful that have already seen their recruitment take off.
Ironically, (or maybe not) most of them come from two schools.
If you follow what I’ve written or simply follow high school football recruiting in general, it should come as no surprise that Providence Day has some studs in the 2025 class. We’ve already mentioned Sanders, who is far and away the most polished offensive tackle in a very good tackle class. The Chargers also have Braxton Winston Braxton Winston 6'0" | 165 lbs | DB Providence Day | 2025 State NC , an athletic corner that already has great length and an offer from South Carolina.
Butler looks poised for a return to greatness behind a strong 2025 class led by quarterback Zach Lawrence Zach Lawrence 6'2" | 205 lbs | QB Butler | 2025 State NC . He has great size and a rocket for an arm. Defensively, edge rusher Ian Coleman and linebacker Isaiah Houston Isaiah Houston 6'2" | 190 lbs | LB Butler | 2025 State NC are both elite. The Bulldogs look great, at least on paper.
The last guy is Gus Ritchey, whose athleticism has college coaches salivating. He has a host of Power Five offers from across the country, both as a tight end and an edge rusher. He’s raw but has already shown some impressive growth. He’s got the highest ceiling in the class and will be a national recruit.
3. Don’t forget the guys “Down East”
When I chat about high school football with my uncle, he always reminds me not to forget the teams “down east”, a region that essentially encompasses anything anything from Fayetteville and Wilmington in the south to Greenville and New Bern in the north It’s typically more lightly recruited than the Raleigh and Charlotte metro areas, at least until later in the recruiting cycle, but there’s a ton of talent that way.
Specifically, I’m following guys like Union Pines defensive end Zachary Mccormick Zachary Mccormick 6'1" | 235 lbs | DL Union Pines | 2025 State NC , Pope John Paul II’s Quinn McCaffrey Quinn McCaffrey 6'4" | 190 lbs | ATH JH Rose | 2025 State NC , Seventy First’s DeAndre Nance DeAndre Nance 6'3" | 185 lbs | QB Seventy-First | 2025 State NC , Overhills quarterback Jordan Bryant Jordan Bryant 6'3" | 180 lbs | QB Overhills | 2025 State NC , North Lenoir running back Malik Fuller Malik Fuller 5'11" | 205 lbs | RB North Lenoir | 2025 NC and Pine Forest athlete Latrell Carter Latrell Carter 5'8" | 170 lbs | ATH Pine Forest | 2025 State NC and Jacksonville’s Demon June Jr. Demon June Jr. 5'11" | 215 lbs | RB Jacksonville | 2025 State NC .
As always, there will be more players that emerge from that area of the state as the years unfold. Don’t mistake a lack of recruiting in the area for a lack of talent. Guys in the 2023 class that we’ve always been high on like Jre Jackson Jre Jackson 5'8" | 175 lbs | RB Terry Sanford | 2023 State NC are just now seeing their recruitment take off, despite being higher on our board than many players in other regions that have the offers.
4. What’s the goal here?
If you’ll notice, we’re very selective with who makes the numerical rankings portion of our class updates. We typically start with only 10 or so players. The reason for that is simple. I won’t call out any publications or players by name, but we’ve all seen a player get hyped up at a young age by a scout or publication as “the next guy” or “a national recruit” only to see his recruitment struggle to ever get off the ground. It’s brutal when a player has been told he’s a surefire D1 guy and then doesn’t pan out the way some random person said he would.
We seek to avoid that. The scouting process all about projecting future production rather than evaluating past production which requires increasingly more guesswork the younger you go. Show me 100 seniors and I could accurately project the futures of about 50-60 (Even the best scouts miss a lot, just look at the NFL draft). Show me 100 freshmen and I might get 20. To avoid the awkwardness of continually dropping a guy we over-ranked to start, we rank fewer players in the earlier classes and expand the list each update. It’s not a fool-proof plan, but it does avoid the frequent “overhyping” that we see elsewhere. I’d much rather tell a player I think he’s a D2 guy only for him to prove me wrong and earn a D1 scholarship than to tell a kid he’s going to a Power Five school before he struggles to gain traction on the recruiting trail.
5. What will the rankings look like in 3 months? In 6? In 12?
Currently, we have 10 ranked players in the 2025 class and another 30 on the watch list. After a summer of college camps and offers, we expect to add another 10-15 players to the ranked list and another 10-20 to the watch list, based on feedback we receive from coaches and players. We try not to rank any players that we haven’t seen, either on film or in person, so if a coach tells us, “so-and-so will have a big year for us” we’ll gladly add him to the watch list and move him to the rankings if he posts some solid film. We’ll add 10-15 players to the watch list next update (End of summer) based on feedback from coaches and trainers.
After the season (In January or February) we’ll release another update. We hope that by that point we’ll have around 50 players ranked and another 25-50 on the watch list. It’ll be then that we release our initial 2026 rankings and our final 2023 rankings. A year from now, we’ll release our post-spring rankings update. We’ll move players from the watch list that we see in person at spring camps and add some more players to the rankings that weren’t even on our radar (It always happens). By this time next year, we hope to have a small watch list and large rankings list of at least 100 players. Over time, the watch list will shrink and the numerical rankings will grow. Three years from now, this class should have at least 200 players ranked. It just grows over time as more players make an impact for their schools.
That’s a lot of technical talk, but hopefully it makes sense.
As always, let me know what you think. Tell me how wrong I am for not ranking Player X or tell me to keep sleeping on Player Y. I love it. I love being proved wrong because I want to see every player that wants to play college football earn a chance to play college football, whether that’s at an SEC power or in the NAIA.