The Scenario
You are a college football beat writer. Conference realignment is your beat and SEC recruiting is your next feature. You need every 2024 recruiting commit for the SEC — name, position, star rating, composite rating, commit school, and hometown — plus every 2024 transfer portal entry from Power 5 programs in a second tab, all before your editor's Wednesday 5 PM deadline.
It is Tuesday morning. You have interviews scheduled this afternoon and no data yet.
The bad version:
- You find the CollegeFootballData.com recruiting endpoint and hit it for one SEC school
- You realize you need to loop across all 16 SEC schools and aggregate
- You repeat for transfer portal, which is a different endpoint with different field names
- You paste two separate JSON exports into your Excel workbook and the column structures do not match
- You spend two hours aligning columns and deduplicating transfers who changed their minds twice
- You walk into your afternoon interviews without a data hook for the story.
The fast version is two prompts.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI knows which endpoints cover recruiting and the transfer portal, so you do not have to find them yourself.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Fetch all 2024 recruiting commits for the SEC conference and paste them into a tab called "SEC Recruiting 2024" with columns for name, position, star rating, composite rating, commit school, and hometown.
SheetXAI pulls every commit across all 16 SEC schools, aggregates the results, and writes the clean table. Then ask:
Pull the 2024 transfer portal entries for Power 5 conferences and add them to my "Transfer Tracker" tab with columns for player name, position, origin school, destination school, star rating, and eligibility status.
Two tabs, two prompts, done before lunch.
What You Get
"SEC Recruiting 2024" tab — every commit ranked by composite rating:
- Name, position, star rating, composite rating — the core recruiting profile
- Commit school — which SEC program landed each prospect
- Hometown — state-by-state recruiting geography for the feature angle
"Transfer Tracker" tab — every Power 5 portal entry for 2024:
- Player name and position — who moved
- Origin and destination school — the full movement picture
- Star rating and eligibility status — context for the impact analysis
Both tabs are story-ready. The composite rating column in SEC Recruiting gives you the rank-order for "who landed the best class." The origin/destination columns in the Transfer Tracker give you the net-gain-or-loss angle for each program.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Recruiting and transfer portal data has quirks. SheetXAI handles them in the same prompt.
When composite ratings are missing for some commits
Early commits sometimes appear before a composite rating is calculated. You do not want blank cells breaking your sort.
For any row in the "SEC Recruiting 2024" tab where the composite rating is blank, fill it with the star-rating-based estimate (5-star = 0.99, 4-star = 0.90, 3-star = 0.85, 2-star = 0.80). Mark those rows with an asterisk in a new "Estimated" column.
When you want to group recruiting totals by school
For the feature sidebar, you need each SEC school's class size, average composite rating, and five-star count.
In a new tab called "Class Summary," summarize the "SEC Recruiting 2024" data by commit school. For each school, calculate total commits, average composite rating, and count of five-star commits. Sort by average composite rating descending.
When the transfer portal has duplicate entries
Some players entered and withdrew and re-entered the portal. The workbook may have multiple rows per player.
In the "Transfer Tracker" tab, deduplicate by player name, keeping only the most recent entry. Flag any player who appears more than once with a "Multiple Entries" note in a new column.
When you want both datasets merged for a conference-level view
Your feature needs a combined look: who came in via recruiting plus who came in via the portal for each SEC school.
Combine the "SEC Recruiting 2024" commits and the "Transfer Tracker" entries where the destination school is an SEC program into a single tab called "Total Additions." Add a column for source (Recruiting or Transfer Portal). For each SEC school, calculate total additions and average composite rating across both sources.
The pattern: recruiting data and portal data are two different endpoints, but the analytical story lives in the combination. Ask for both.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open a blank workbook, then ask it to pull the recruiting class for any conference and year. The CollegeFootballData.com integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For more, see how to pull historical poll rankings or the CollegeFootballData.com in Excel overview.