Inside the player personnel operation at Liberty uncovering how they’ve found their competitive edge and how a year-round evaluation system built on Teamworks Player Personnel turned a stressful portal window into a strategic advantage.
When the portal moved faster than the process
Liberty Football had a workable system for player evaluation in the early days of the transfer portal. The staff leaned on a combination of Twitter and YouTube to surface highlights and PFF for game film. When a player caught someone’s eye, that person forwarded the film to the relevant position coach. It moved, but it moved loosely.
This year’s transfer portal changed the calculus. Decision windows compressed even faster. The volume of available prospects expanded beyond what a small staff could track through manual scraping, and the informal, decentralized approach started to show its limits. Power Four programs absorbed the volume with large pools of student assistants running parallel searches. Liberty did not have that option. Every hour a full-time staff member spent scraping Twitter was an hour not spent on evaluation.
What Liberty needed was a system that could track players in-season before they entered the portal, maintain longitudinal records on prospects from prior recruiting cycles, and let position coaches act on curated shortlists rather than unfiltered long lists. Speed and organization were the non-negotiables.
“When you invest in the right technology, you multiply what your staff can do,” said Colton Korn, General Manager of Personnel, Liberty Football. “Teamworks Player Personnel lets us build boards all season, filter for exactly what our system needs, and by the time the portal opens, we’re ahead. We’re executing on a plan we’ve been building for months.”
A year-round evaluation machine, not a December scramble
Liberty implemented Teamworks Player Personnel as its central player tracking and evaluation system, replacing an outdated workflow with organized boards that the staff builds throughout the regular season. Any game during the season becomes an active scouting opportunity: a player flagged in October with notes on get-off speed or route-running technique has a file ready when he enters the portal in December. The platform can also track players Liberty recruited in prior years, lost to other programs, or chose not to offer, giving the staff a live, searchable history rather than a cold start each portal cycle. The result is a recruiting operation that runs twelve months a year, not one that spins up in December and scrambles to catch up.
For quarterback evaluation, Korn built his process around the platform’s comparison feature. When Liberty identifies a need, Korn uses the platform to surface comparable player profiles across the country, then filters by the metrics that matter for Liberty’s spread-option system: mobility, short-to-intermediate accuracy, and interception avoidance. Low snap counts, which would have been difficult to evaluate in a manual environment, become workable data points when filters can isolate whether turnovers were schematic or driven by poor decision-making.
“Being able to filter guys throughout the season has been huge,” said Korn. “You’re building for your offense, building for your team specifically. Being able to curate to what you actually do, that’s what makes everything quicker.”
An organizational edge that compounds across every portal cycle
Beyond individual prospects, the longitudinal record serves as a checks-and-balances function: cross-referencing which players staff members evaluated most favorably against eventual outcomes gives Korn a running read on whether the personnel staff is identifying the right players over time.
The 2026 transfer portal cycle produced 28 additions to the Liberty Football roster, with players arriving from programs spanning Power Four conferences down to Division II and FCS competition. That range reflects the breadth of Liberty’s scouting operation, which runs year-round and across every level.
“We’re not going to use anything as an excuse. Teamworks gives us everything we need to do more with less and we’re going to be the best at it,” said Korn.
