we recruited to fill the people graduating/leaving early.

Getting 21 portal kids is sustainable if we lose 13 to the portal. If, on an average year, BYU loses 20 players to graduation and 10 to portal, we'd still be getting 22 HS kids and 8 portal kids to fill the gap of 30.

If we take 21 and only lose 4 to the portal, then the portal has basically supplanted HS recruiting; that is NOT a good thing.

If we take 21 and lose 30 to the portal, that's obviously a bad thing too.

The raw number of recruits doesn't matter as much as it does the context of what holes we had to fill. Some years, only 10 graduate/leave early; others it could be 30. Some HS classes will have 12 kids, others will have 25. Some years, we'll lose 5 to the portal; others it could be 20. We just have to be flexible and get the best available players that we can from the portal, whether it's 10 or 71 (I can't even fathom what is happening in Boulder)...