Bearcats 2025 Football Recruiting Class Finalized on Signing Day

Not trending the right direction on this front.

Cincinnati Bearcats head coach Scott Satterfield looks on in before the College Football game between the Cincinnati Bearcats and the Towson Tigers at Nippert Stadium in Cincinnati on Saturday, Aug. 31, 2024. / Albert Cesare/The Enquirer / USA TODAY NETWORK

CINCINNATI — Football recruiting is trending in the wrong direction during the Scott Satterfield era. Signing Day for the 2025 class has arrived and Cincinnati is locked into an average team ranking of 66 nationally across the major national services. On 247Sports, Cincinnati's class ranking has dropped multiple spots during each cycle Satterfield has overseen.

It's a far cry from the early-2020s momentum Luke Fickell and his staff started building before he left for Wisconsin. Cincinnati's recruiting class is ranked 13th or worse among Big 12 teams on every major recruiting service. The staff has done a nice job securing talent in the transfer portal over the last two seasons, but the recruiting trail is lagging behind.

Recruits are flocking to bigger NIL offers after committing to Cincinnati, other more specific reasons, or just jumping at currently better programs in general when those teams come calling.

After Jahmari DeLoatch's de-commitment, Cincinnati's signed just one four-star player (Top-250 talent Daniel James) over Satterfield's first two real cycles (no consensus four-star talents in this class).

Turning the view locally, Cincinnati's landed one talent. Quinton Price is the only local recruit to sign with the team in 2024 and 2025, while they don't have a top-30 Ohio player in either of those classes (Gavin Grover highest-ranked at No. 31 in Ohio). The 2025 class is even lower, with no top-60 Ohio players (rankings from 247Sports).

It's transfer portal or bust when injecting major new talent into the team for next season. Not that freshmen can largely be relied on anyway in an ever changing college football landscape. The strategy may just have to be larger slices of the pie for more experienced talents in the portal and in-house retainment. That's understandable given financial facts for funding college football rosters, but it puts a tighter cap on the ceiling this program is trying to bust through after knocking into it in 2021.

The recruiting staff's mantra makes sense, to an extent: Game tape over five stars. That's fun to say, but these five-stars aren't just magically ranked that high. They nearly always have elite game tape, that's why you rise that much and are in that high a demand.

It's really game tape over NIL funds. The financial pie is only so big and the risk with high school players flaming out is even bigger than that pie.

Talent is still all over the Bearcats roster, but elite talent is yet to arise from the recruiting trail, time will tell with these classes and beyond.

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