College football recruiting: Winners, losers, big questions - ESPN

Official visits are done, the flood of summer commitments is gone and the August recruiting dead period is here. In a few weeks, college football's elite will compete again on the field.

It was a busy summer in the recruiting cycle with 48 of the top-100 prospects in the 2025 ESPN 300 announcing their commitments between June 1 and Aug. 17. Some classes — Alabama, Auburn and Georgia Tech — rose rapidly over the summer months. Others, such as USC, Ole Miss and Notre Dame, suffered blows along the way. At the end of it, just 16 of ESPN's top-100 prospects remain uncommitted.

As attention turns toward the football season, ESPN spoke with 11 recruiting and player personnel staffers across the Power 4 conferences, from winners across the country to the programs with questions and what comes next in the final months of the 2025 cycle this fall.

«There's going to be flips and there's going to be movement,» said one Big Ten recruiting staffer. «Nothing surprises us at this point»

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What Alabama did: Could Kalen DeBoer continue the elite recruiting pipeline to Tuscaloosa after Nick Saban? It was a question hanging over the 49-year-old's early months at Alabama.

«We didn't feel his staff at all at Washington in the high school ranks,» one Oregon personnel staffer told ESPN. «When they went [to Alabama], you wondered: Are they ready to big-boy recruit?»

There's now a resounding answer. Since June 1, the Crimson Tide have added 14 commits to the program's 2025 class, including 10 pledges from inside the ESPN 300. Alabama sits second inESPN's latest class rankings for the 2025 class.

The Crimson Tide's productive summer began on June 4 when Alabama flipped SMU commit Keelon