Transfer Portal - Nearly Half The Players Don't Find A New Home

August 23, 2022 by Staff

So you don't like the way things turned out at your first school of choice? Enter the transfer portal and pick again. If you are the likes of a Caleb Williams, Spencer Rattler, or Quinn Ewers - all top QB recruits out of high school - landing at a solid FBS Power 5 school wasn't a problem. But it doesn't play out that way for hundreds - yes, hundreds - of players who languish in the system.

According to the NCAA Transfer Portal Database, 1,427 FBS players entered the portal in calendar year 2021. Forty-two percent of those did not find a new home and 4% withdrew from the portal. Of the 54% that did manage to find a new home, 13% wound up below the FBS or even the FCS.

The numbers were dramatically worse for FCS players with only 38% of 626 players landing at any type of a new destination.

Sadly, it's not always the player that makes the sole decision to transfer. Player "churn" has become a real concern, i.e., schools constantly trolling the portal in an effort to "improve" the roster and, oftentimes, simply stockpile athletes to keep them from playing for a competitor.

The transfer portal has become a return to the wild west of yesteryear when scholarship limits were lowered to 85 in 1994. That marked a reduction from 95 between 1988 and 1993, and 105 before that.

There is no doubt that the result is creating an extremely tilted playing field with the upper-echelon teams finding it easy to replace exiting talent with equal or increasingly better talent. At the other end of the spectrum sits a school like Kansas that is minus-15 in its turnover for 2022, meaning it lost 15 more players to the portal than it gained in return.

Shane Beamer at South Carolina says he has six unused scholarships, even though he won the Spencer Rattler lottery.

Also consider that the portal seems to offer an excuse for players looking for a richer NIL (name, image, likeness) situation which taints the entire process, and actually complicates the efforts of colleges that are trying to negotiate NIL contracts.

At the end of the day, it all adds up to an incentive for tampering, an act that results in punishment for professional clubs, but is so far unrestrained in college athletics. While we're not accusing Nick Saban or Jimbo Fisher of backroom deal-making, the unfortunate reality is that the opportunity is there. And where there is opportunity, there is temptation.

And finally, take note that some players have transferred more than once. Quarterback Charlie Brewer has taken a circuitous journey to Liberty where he was just recently named the starting QB. The Austin, Texas high school standout at Lake Travis High originally committed to SMU, but flipped to Baylor where he played from 2017-2020 and graduated. Thanks to Covid, he had  a year of eligibility remaining so he left Waco and went to Utah where he started the first three games in 2021 before he was benched and immediately went back to the transfer portal. In December of 2021, he committed to the FBS independent Flames.

J.T. Daniels is another QB who has used the transfer portal on more than one occasion. A superstar QB at Mater Dei in California and top over-all recruit, committed to USC. He became the starter as a freshman in 2018, and again as a sophomore. But after tearing his ACL in the opener of his second season with the Trojans, Kedon Slovis took over as the starter and Daniels entered the transfer portal in April of 2020. He stayed in the portal for roughly six weeks before he got the call from Georgia where he became the starter for the final four games of 2020. Daniels also won the job for 2021 but suffered an oblique injury vs. Clemson that caused him to sit out the UAB game. He returned for two more starts, but was replaced by Stetson Bennett during the Vanderbilt game who kept the job and led the 'Dawgs to a national title. Daniels entered the transfer portal a second time in February and was expected to wind up at LSU or Auburn or North Carolina or Oklahoma or Notre Dame, but he sat in the portal for over two months before committing to West Virginia in April.

By the way, the aforementioned Slovis is now at Pitt because the hiring of Lincoln Riley at USC led to his Oklahoma QB Caleb Williams following Riley to the west coast.

All of these developments point to another big question. How is NIL revenue going to help players when fans will be reluctant to buy their stuff because too many are coming and going so quickly that no allegiance is ever developed?

It's a quandary - one the NCAA needs to address sooner rather than later.