Shouldn't be surprising, but WSJ article shows how top players in G5 frequently moving to P4 school exacerbates the quality gap between the two.
"The Wall Street Journal reviewed the 2023 first-team all-conference selections for the five smaller leagues that compete the top tier of Division I. These conferences are the American Athletic, Conference USA, the Mid-American, the Mountain West and the Sun Belt, known collectively as the “Group of Five.”
The impact of the transfer portal is striking: After eliminating those who graduated or departed for the NFL, a whopping 40% of the remaining players with all-conference honors switched to another program. The vast majority of them bolted to a team in the Power Four (the Atlantic Coast, Big 12, Big Ten and Southeastern conferences). Even when adding second- and third-team all-conference picks, 36% wound up transferring.
The data shows the extent to which the balance of power has shifted in college football. The smaller conferences have always had a disadvantage compared with their larger peers. Now, they have effectively become a farm system—developing talented players only to lose them to their wealthier competitors. Competing against the likes of Alabama and Michigan was always hard, even before those juggernauts could just snatch up players like books in the campus library.
“Some of those leagues,” former Texas A&M coach Jimbo Fisher said in a radio interview earlier this year, “they’re becoming glorified junior colleges.”"