Help & the Recruiting Road

The tool

Using ReelTuna, start to finish

Upload game film. Create a highlight job from a game video — a phone recording from the stands works fine. The system pre-scans the footage and finds every player automatically.
Circle your athlete. The annotator opens the film in the cutting room. Click your athlete on a few frames of each play you want — the tracker follows them through the rest. Tag the action, add a short coach note if a rep deserves one (it gets printed onto the reel), and trim the clip to end at the whistle.
The reel builds itself. A worker renders the final film: your athlete spotlighted, action labels, school and date stamps. If AI play grading is enabled, each play gets a grade — always labeled AI n/10, because a model's opinion should never look like a measured stat.
Fix anything. On a finished reel, Redo annotations reopens the cutting room with every highlighted frame editable — drag an oval that drifted, clear a junk clip, tighten the trim, rebuild.
Share with coaches. Each coach gets their own scout-card link: the reel, your athlete's measurables, GPA, and NCAA ID in one page. You'll see when a coach opens it and how much film they watched — real signals only; nothing here is ever invented.
Run the outreach. The Programs directory helps you build a target list; the Outreach board tracks every coach from first contact to a campus visit. Emails open in your own mail app — ReelTuna never sends mail for you, and never logs into anything of yours.
Post the film. Social exports produce platform-ready cuts for X and Instagram with a suggested caption. You log in as the athlete and post it yourselves — the app never touches those accounts.

The tool

How it works, in plain English

The three things ReelTuna does to your film have technical names that mean nothing to normal people. Here is what each one is actually doing, with the jargon left out entirely.

Following one player — "tracking"

You tap your athlete once. After that the computer keeps its eyes on him for you.

Think about how you find one friend in a crowded hallway. You don't stare at the whole hallway at once. You remember what your friend's jacket looks like, and you keep checking where that jacket moved to.

The computer does exactly that. A video isn't really moving — it's a tall stack of still pictures, about thirty of them every second, flipped past your eyes fast. When you click your player, the computer takes a good look at the small patch of that picture where he is: his colors, his shape, which parts are bright and which are dark. Then it looks at the very next picture and asks one question: which spot here looks most like the patch I just memorized? That spot is where he is now. Then it asks again. And again. Thirty times a second, all the way to the end of the play.

Two tricks keep it from wandering off. First, it only searches near where he just was, because nobody teleports across the field in one thirtieth of a second — so a different player in a matching jersey on the far hash can't steal its attention. Second, it keeps quietly updating its memory of what he looks like, so when he spins around, gets dusty, or a shadow slides over him, it still knows him.

It isn't magic, and it does get lost sometimes — a pile-up, or a referee walking right through him. When that happens you just click him again on that frame and it picks the trail back up. That's the whole reason we ask you to click a few frames per play instead of only one: each click is a fresh, correct memory to work from.

Holding the picture still — "stabilization"

Film shot from the stands wobbles. Whoever is holding the phone swings it to follow the ball, zooms in and out, and gets bumped by the person next to them. So your athlete can be standing perfectly still while the picture of him slides all over the screen.

That's a real problem for us. The circle we draw around your athlete would jitter and slip off him even on plays where he barely moved.

So before the computer worries about any players, it looks at the things that can't move: a yard line, a goalpost, the corner of the scoreboard, a stripe on the bleachers. It picks out a few hundred of these little landmarks in one picture, then goes hunting for those same landmarks in the next one.

Now it can tell apart two things that look identical on a screen. If every single landmark slid the same distance to the left, the field obviously didn't move — the camera turned right. If the landmarks stayed put and one blob moved, that blob is a player genuinely running. Subtract the camera's movement, and what's left is the real football.

The last bit is where the word zero-drift comes from. Tiny mistakes are the danger here: get it wrong by half a hair in every picture, and after a few hundred pictures the circle is sitting in the wrong county. So the computer takes a vote. If three hundred landmarks say "the camera swung left this much" and eleven say something wild, those eleven were probably a bird, a flag, or a fan standing up — and they get thrown out instead of being allowed to drag the answer sideways. Because the mistakes get caught every single picture, they never get the chance to pile up.

Grading the plays — "the AI scout"

Once the clips are cut, an AI watches them and writes about what it sees.

An AI like this got good by taking in a staggering amount of writing, video and images — a lot of football among it. Think of it as a friend who has somehow watched ten thousand games. It is genuinely good at describing a play: where the feet went, who won the block, whether he fired off low or stood straight up, whether he finished or coasted at the whistle. We hand it one clip at a time, ask it specific questions about that kind of play, and it answers in sentences and gives a number out of ten.

Now the part we actually care about you understanding: that number is an opinion, not a measurement. A stopwatch measures a 40-yard dash — hand the stopwatch to anyone and they get the same answer. The AI's grade is more like your uncle's take on the play from the third row. Often sharp. Sometimes flat wrong. Never a fact.

That's why every grade in ReelTuna is stamped AI 7/10 and never plain 7/10. A coach glancing at a scout card should never mistake a computer's guess for something somebody measured. Coaches recruit off the film itself, the way they always have. The AI's job is smaller and more honest than that: help you find your athlete's best reps faster, and hand you words to describe them — not decide how good he is.

Recruiting 101

The divisions & the money, in plain language

College football is played at five levels. The top level, NCAA Division I, is split into two halves with unhelpful acronym names: FBS (Football Bowl Subdivision — the teams you see on TV Saturdays) and FCS (Football Championship Subdivision — full Division I, slightly smaller stage, playoff instead of bowls). Everywhere ReelTuna says D1 FBS or D1 FCS, that's what it means.

The money changed in 2025. A legal settlement (House v. NCAA) replaced the old per-team scholarship caps at Division I schools that opted in with roster caps — an FBS roster is now capped at 105, and every one of those roster spots is allowed to carry a scholarship. How many a school actually funds is up to the school, and many now also share revenue directly with athletes. The table below is the honest shape of it:

Level	What it is	Athletic money (football)	What it means for a family
D1 FBS	The biggest programs — 130+ schools, TV games, bowl season.	Roster capped at 105; schools may fund a scholarship for every roster spot, and many share revenue on top.	The most money and the most competition for it. Full rides are common; so are 300-lb linemen.
D1 FCS	Full Division I with a 24-team playoff.	Traditionally ~63 scholarship equivalents split across the roster; conferences that opted into the settlement can raise that.	Real D1 football and real money, often as partial scholarships combined with academic aid.
D2	Smaller schools, regional schedules, serious football.	Up to 36 scholarship equivalents, almost always split as partials.	Partial athletic money stacked with academic scholarships can rival a bigger offer.
D3	The largest division by school count.	No athletic scholarships — by rule.	Money comes as academic and need-based aid instead, which at many D3 schools is substantial. Grades are the scholarship here.
NAIA	A separate association of smaller colleges, outside the NCAA.	Up to 24 scholarship equivalents.	Simpler rules, earlier contact allowed, and legitimate football with money attached.

So yes — the top division carries the most money, but "less money at lower levels" is only half the story: a D2 partial plus academic aid, or a generous D3 academic package, can cost a family less than a walk-on spot at an FBS school. Compare net cost, not labels.

The NIL question. How much NIL or revenue-share money a school has left in a given year is not public — schools and collectives don't publish budgets or balances, so any tool claiming to show "remaining NIL money" is guessing. What is public: whether a school opted into the House revenue-share model, and the league-wide cap. The real answer comes from the coach, and it is a fair, normal question once a conversation is live: "what does the NIL and scholarship picture look like for offensive linemen in his class?" Ask it directly — programs that want your athlete will answer specifically.

Recruiting 101

When coaches are allowed to talk to you

The single most useful rule: your athlete can always reach out first. Emailing a coach film, filling out a program's recruiting questionnaire, calling an office — none of that is ever against the rules. The restrictions are on when coaches may respond and initiate. For Division I and II football, the big dates are:

June 15 after sophomore year — coaches may begin private electronic contact: emails, texts, DMs, and recruiting materials.
September 1 of junior year — phone calls and broader contact open up.
Junior year onward — official visits (the school pays for the athlete and family to visit campus). Unofficial visits — you pay your own way — are allowed far earlier.
Division 3 and NAIA — much looser: contact can generally happen at any time.

The recruiting calendar also has contact, evaluation, quiet, and dead periods that change what coaches can do in person month to month. Don't memorize them — if a coach goes silent in a dead period, it isn't personal. Before acting on a specific date, check the current calendar at ncaa.org — these rules genuinely change year to year.

Recruiting 101

NCAA eligibility — the paperwork that can't wait

Register with the NCAA Eligibility Center (eligibilitycenter.org) — required to play or take official visits at D1 and D2 schools. Do it by the start of junior year. Registration issues the NCAA ID that coaches ask for — store it in your athlete's ReelTuna profile and it appears on the scout card and in coach letters automatically.
Sixteen core courses. D1 eligibility is built on 16 specific high-school core courses (English, math, science, social studies, and more), ten of them finished before senior year. Your school counselor can map your athlete's transcript against the list — do this early, because a missing core course in junior year is fixable and in senior year often is not.
The GPA sliding scale. D1 uses a sliding scale of core-course GPA against test scores; a 2.3 core GPA is the floor for competition. Higher grades don't just clear the bar — they unlock the academic money that makes D2/D3 offers real.
D3 doesn't use the Eligibility Center — admission to the school is the bar. NAIA has its own eligibility center at play.naia.org.

Recruiting 101

Academics & admissions — what schools actually publish

Schools do not publish academic requirements for their sports programs. Admissions offices keep flexibility for recruited athletes and never commit those standards to paper, so there is no page anywhere that says "our football players need X." What a family can read is public, and three sources cover most of it:

The NCAA sliding scale — the floor to be eligible to compete (see NCAA eligibility above). It is the NCAA's bar, not the school's: plenty of schools expect more than the scale's minimum, none may take less.
The school's Common Data Set — search "<school name> common data set". Section C of that PDF is the admitted class in numbers: GPA bands, middle-50% test scores, admit rate. Recruited athletes are often admitted below the school-wide profile, but the CDS tells you what the campus classroom actually looks like — the honest way to judge whether a school is an academic reach before anyone falls in love with it.
The NCAA APR database (web3.ncaa.org/aprsearch) — the Academic Progress Rate, per team, searchable by school. It measures whether a D1 program keeps its players eligible and on track to graduate; a football team consistently near the bottom is telling you how it treats the student half of student-athlete.

For the standard nobody publishes, ask the position coach directly — "what does admissions need from him?" is a normal question on a call, and coaches answer it precisely because they clear recruits with admissions every year. And keep the transcript strong regardless: the same GPA that clears eligibility is what unlocks academic money at D2, D3 and NAIA, where athletic scholarships are smaller or don't exist.

Recruiting 101

Reading levels honestly

Coaches recruit linemen on film first — leverage, feet, finish — but size opens doors. These are typical ranges for offensive linemen at each level, drawn from published recruiting-service data. They are patterns, not cutoffs; every level has outliers, and a great junior season changes everything.

Level	Typical OL height	Typical OL weight
D1 FBS	6'4" – 6'6"	290 – 315 lbs
D1 FCS	6'3" – 6'5"	280 – 300 lbs
D2	6'2" – 6'4"	270 – 295 lbs
D3 / NAIA	6'0" – 6'4"	250 – 290 lbs

A good target list spreads across levels on purpose: a few reach schools, a solid middle your athlete's film and frame genuinely match, and a few schools that would say yes today. ReelTuna deliberately does not score or rank programs for you — no algorithm knows your kid, your finances, or what campus felt right. The directory gives you the facts (level, conference, location); the film and the conversations do the rest.

Recruiting 101

Reading the σ numbers

On the Programs page, ReelTuna measures your athlete against a school's actual line room and reports the distance in sigmas (σ) — standard deviations. One σ is that room's own yardstick for "typical spread": it is computed from how much the players on that roster actually vary, so the same inch of height can be a big deal in a tightly-bunched room and a shrug in a varied one. That is why σ beats raw inches for comparing schools.

0σ means the middle of that room — built like the players already there. On the radar it's the dashed ring.
±1σ is ordinary. In a bell-curve world about two players in three sit within 1σ of the middle, so anything in that band reads as "fits right in."
±2σ is unusual, ±3σ is rare. Beyond 2σ is roughly the most extreme 1-in-20; beyond 3σ, 1-in-several-hundred. A +2.9σ height doesn't mean "too big" — it means he'd tower over that particular room.
Direction is information, not a grade. Way above a room's center says the roster is built smaller than him — often a sign to also look a level up, where the rooms match his frame. Below center says the opposite. Neither is a verdict; coaches take outliers in both directions every year.

Two kinds of "how unusual" phrasing appear next to the sigmas, and they are deliberately different. "Taller than 18 of the 20" is an exact count against the school's fetched roster — no statistics, just the list. "≈96th percentile nationally" is a bell-curve estimate against published national norms for that level, used where no roster list exists (wingspan always, since rosters don't publish it; whole rooms when a fetched roster is too thin to trust). The ≈ is honest: it assumes sizes follow a bell curve, so we round to whole percentiles and never claim past the 99th — a sample of twenty can't tell the top 0.1% from the top 1%.

The combined figure (say "1.9σ") folds height, weight and wingspan into one weighted distance from the room's center, with wingspan counted at half weight for interior linemen (the weights are shown on the panel). It is a distance, not a rank — there is no such thing as a percentile for it — and a small combined number simply means "shaped like the players already there." Which schools go on the list, and which tier each one gets, stays the family's call: the sigmas are measurements, the call is yours.

Reference

Glossary

FBS / FCS: The two halves of NCAA Division I football. FBS is the bowl-game tier; FCS crowns its champion in a playoff. Both are "D1."
Scholarship equivalency: A pool of scholarship money a program may split into partial scholarships across many players — the norm at FCS, D2, and NAIA. "Full ride for everyone" is mostly an FBS phenomenon.
Walk-on / preferred walk-on: A roster player without athletic money. "Preferred" means a guaranteed roster spot. Under the new roster caps these spots are scarcer than they used to be.
Redshirt: A season on the team without game competition that preserves a year of eligibility.
Official vs. unofficial visit: Official: the school pays for the trip (junior year onward). Unofficial: you pay, allowed much earlier and unlimited.
Verbal commitment: A public promise, binding on nobody. Commitments become real when financial aid or roster agreements are signed — the old National Letter of Intent was retired in 2024.
NCAA ID: The number the Eligibility Center issues at registration; coaches use it to look up your athlete's academic status. Lives on the athlete profile here.
Contact / evaluation / quiet / dead periods: The recruiting calendar's four modes, controlling whether coaches may meet you in person, watch your athlete, host you on campus, or none of the above.