During the presser following two losses to St. John’s in this year’s NCAA Tallahassee Regional, a reporter asked Florida State head coach Link Jarrett how he would move forward to build next year’s player roster.
“I'm open to advice,” Jarrett replied.
The blank look on his face reminded me of the presser where Bobby Bowden uttered a famous admission to an equally perplexing question. “I’m bumfuzzled,” Bowden admitted honestly, sending reporters in search of exactly what the term bumfuzzled even meant.
Now 30 years later, I asked Gemini Ai the same question: “What does Bumfuzzled mean?”
And bingo! Ai replied: “Bumfuzzled is a fantastic old-school slang word that means completely confused, perplexed, flummoxed or bewildered.”
Ai notes bumfuzzled is indigenous to the southeastern United States and originated in the late 19th or early 20th century.
Go figure.
“It’s a great, colorful way to say, ‘I have absolutely no idea what is going on!’ ”
It is doubtful Jarrett has no idea what is going on as he lives and breathes baseball. Ask any of his former teammates or friends and they’ll tell you they have struck out trying to maintain a conversation other than baseball with FSU’s skipper.
But the reality is the college baseball schedule is a mess for all college coaches as they try to build their roster especially in baseball. The transfer portal opened the same day Jarrett’s team, and seven others, were knocked out of the NCAA tournament.
“Somebody told me there’s thousands of players in (the portal) today,” he said.
So much for postseason exit interviews with players.
And then the Major League Draft is in mid-July.
How many of his players would enter the portal? How many of his players, the high school prospects he’s recruiting, not to mention players in the portal, would declare for the draft, he wondered aloud.
“Are we talking 9, 10, 11, 12?” Jarrett asked. “In all of my imagination of what it would be like to coach, never could you dream this is where it has landed in terms of trying to construct a roster to produce a functional team.
“It is as hard as anything I ever thought I would do as a college baseball coach.”
Bumfuzzled is a great, colorful word to describe how all college baseball coaches feel as they compete with each other to build a functional roster, one with all the bits and pieces, and one that actually fits together.
While Jarrett said he was “open to advice,” we have none to offer. Instead, The Osceola took a deep dive into the composition of the College World Series teams to glean a better understanding of how each school built their rosters, whether through the transfer portal or by more traditional recruiting and development of high school and junior college prospects.
And while a study of the overall roster composition is interesting, we took an even deeper look into the composition of the starting lineup and pitching rotations for those eight teams, including North Carolina, which has the most high school players on their roster (76.32 percent), and Georgia, the team with the fewest (21.95 percent).
As a frame of reference for Osceola readers, we also examined the composition of Florida State’s roster in Link Jarrett’s fourth year at Florida State. And, yes, we also examined the starting lineup for the Seminoles in the NCAA Regionals.
Here’s what we found: of the 38 players on the Seminoles overall roster, 20 were recruited from the high school ranks (HS), six came from what we used to refer to as junior colleges (JuCo), which are now four-year state universities, and 12 came from other collegiate baseball programs via the transfer portal (Portal).
Here is the breakdown on each of the eight College World Series overall rosters for 2026:
Alabama (43-man roster): 25 HS, 4 JuCo, 14 Portal
Georgia (41-man roster): 9 HS, 3 JuCo, 29 Portal
North Carolina (38-man roster): 29 HS, 2 JuCo, 7 Portal
Oklahoma (37-man roster): 17 HS, 10 JuCo, 10 Portal
Ole Miss (38-man roster): 24 HS, 3 JuCo, 11 Portal
Texas (38-man roster): 20 HS, no JuCo, 18 Portal
Troy (38-man roster): 9 HS, 10 JuCo, 17 Portal
West Virginia (43-man roster): 25 HS, 2 JuCo, 16 Portal
Sorting by high school and juco
To make this an easier read, we have ranked the schools based on their recruitment of what we deem traditional pre-portal class (high school of community college players) below:
North Carolina — 81.57 percent
Oklahoma — 72.97 percent
Ole Miss — 71.05 percent
Alabama — 67.44 percent
West Virginia — 62.79 percent
Troy — 52.78 percent
Texas — 52.63 percent
Georgia — 29.27 percent
Florida State’s roster composition of players recruited from the high school and juco ranks (68.42 percent) is only slightly higher than the average of the eight schools playing in Omaha this year.
Starting lineup composition
The data becomes more interesting when you scratch a little deeper.
Let’s start with Georgia, who like Troy has only nine players they recruited from the high school ranks. Only 25 percent of Troy’s 36-man roster were recruited by them directly from high school, but Troy signed 10 from the community college ranks to Georgia’s three. A whopping 29 of Georgia’s 41 players are transfers. Furthermore, 11 of the 12 players who played in the Bulldogs CWS opening victory were transfers. And seven of those 11 are first-year players, including 2026 Stanford transfer Joey Volchko, who dominated Texas for nine innings in a 7-1 victory over Texas, the Bulldogs' first win in Omaha in 18 years.
Six of the UGA’s top seven pitchers are transfers, four arriving for the 2026 season, from Southern Cal, Michigan and two from Stanford.
WVU has productive portal players
West Virginia’s overall roster features more high school and community college players (62.8 percent) — including the hero of the win over Troy on Tuesday, Gavin Kelly, who came to WVU out of high school in 2025. But their batting order in Omaha was slightly skewed to transfer portal with five of the nine starters (56 percent). The majority of WVU’s pitching production — seven of their top 11 pitchers (63.64 percent) — also came from the portal with five of those seven arriving in 2026.
UNC pitching built on high school development
North Carolina’s overall roster is evidence of successful high school recruitment and development, especially when it comes to pitching, where all but one reliever, a Princeton graduate transfer, was developed in Chapel Hill. But when you look at their starting lineup, you’ll find five of the first six batters in their lineup are transfers, with their high school and community college signees batting seven to nine. Each of those transfers are brand new to the UNC team.
In case you are interested, and I’m sure you are, of the top nine players in FSU’s lineup, five came from the high school ranks and two from junior colleges. And if Myles Bailey hadn’t injured his ankle in the 29th game of the season, FSU’s lineup would be even heavier weighted with high school players.
Of the nine most productive arms on the FSU pitching staff, two were recruited from high school, two from junior colleges and five were portal transfers.
While Georgia and North Carolina are on extreme ends of the roster composition spectrum, the other six teams have rosters that fall somewhere in between.
First year for 8 Sooners
While only one of the starters in Oklahoma’s batting order came through the transfer portal, six of the top 15 pitchers - including both relievers to throw in the opening games of the CWS – were developed elsewhere. Of Oklahoma's top 15 pitchers only four were recruited out of high school, while five came from junior colleges.
Eight of the 13 Oklahoma players to break a sweat in the CWS, including all four pitchers thus far, are in their first year with the team, giving a whole new meaning to the word Sooners.
‘There are many ways to skin a cat’
As we studied the eight rosters, finding great diversity in their composition, we were reminded of another colorful old expression – “There are more ways than one to skin a cat” – which gave us another opportunity to test the power of Ai.
Ai reports those words first appeared in a short story “The Money Diggers” and later in Mark Twain’s 1889 novel, a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.
Ai’s definition: “The expression means there are multiple methods to achieve the same result or solve a problem, which is a colorful, albeit gruesome, idiom with a long history of evolution.”
And that friends is just the advice Link said he was open to receiving.
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