The transfer portal did not go as Alabama fans hoped. Kalen DeBoer and general manager Courtney Morgan got priced out of their top targets, Cam Coleman and Hollywood Smothers, so the Crimson Tide will be relying on a lot of young talent to get back to the College Football Playoff in 2026.
However, despite their struggles in the portal market, Alabama’s new regime has cleaned up on the recruiting trail. With back-to-back top-five classes, DeBoer and Morgan have maintained Bama’s place as a high school recruiting powerhouse, and with the portal starting to wind down, that’s where they’re turning their attention.
On Tuesday, Alabama’s brass paid Monshun Sales, the No. 1 WR in the 2027 class, a visit. The 6-foot-5 playmaker from Indiana is a top 10 overall player in the country, and the Tide are one of the favorites to land him, alongside Indiana and Ohio State.
— Monshun “Showtime” Sales (@__1problem) January 20, 2026
Is focusing on recruiting high school talent still a viable path to a national title?
It’s never a bad idea to recruit elite prospects like Sales, and Alabama has a budding reputation of success with young wide receivers from Ryan Williams’ stellar freshman season to Lotzeir Brooks’s breakout in the College Football Playoff. Still, it’s worth questioning if Alabama has the right approach to building a championship team in the Transfer Portal era.
Elite recruiting is helpful, but in an era when the best teams are filled with veteran transfers in their final year of eligibility, it’s a challenge to compete with a young roster, and with so much money in the portal, it can be equally difficult to keep those former four and five-stars on your roster for three or four years.
It’s the prevailing question of team-building in the portal era. Can you still win by spending most of your resources on recruiting and developing high school talent, or are you just doing that for another program to reap the benefits by plucking them out of the portal? Maybe it’s just better to pay the premium for proven talent.
Alabama may not have a choice. It seems that the Tide don’t have the war chest to compete with Texas, Texas Tech, Texas A&M, and the sport’s other portal superpowers. So DeBoer and Morgan will plow forward with a high school first philosophy that demands patience that Alabama fans may not have.
1 year of Cam Coleman or 3 years of Monshun Sales (if he even stays that long)?
High school recruiting is cheaper than portaling your roster, and Alabama has done a good job retaining talent. But it’s a much longer pathway to contention, and in a sport where Curt Cignetti took the losingest program in the country and won a national title in just two years. Even if it’s the more sustainable way to build, it begs another question: will Alabama fans have the patience?
Stacking elite recruiting classes has to be a pathway to the top of the sport. That hasn’t changed. But with those classes getting chipped away by the portal every year, it’s impossible to stack the roster as Alabama did under Saban with five-stars backing up five-stars, and with every program having money to spend, the gap has closed between the best recruiting classes and the rest of the country. The margin for error just isn't the same as it used to be.
Alabama fans, obviously, should want to land Sales. He could be a game-changing wide receiver and a dominant force from Day 1. But will he ever be better than Cam Coleman is right now? And will even three years of Sales match the value of one season of Coleman? Can the Tide even keep him for three years?
Until we see how the sport plays over the next few years of the portal era, we’ll have more questions than answers. But it’s hard not wonder if the programs that are still all-in on high school recruiting are heading down the wrong path.