Transfer Portal Turning College Sports Into Free Agency Bonanza
Like it or not, free agency has arrived in college sports in the form of the transfer portal.
No longer do teams have to rely on recruiting high school players or junior college players to fill their voids.
Far from it.
Now, teams can literally reshape their rosters via picking up player after player from the transfer portal.
How out of control has the transfer portal gotten?
Well as of this writing there are a staggering 1,300-plus football players in the aforementioned portal. No, that is not a misprint.
Last year 3,000 FBS players entered the portal.
The current 45-day window for players to jump in the portal lasts until Jan. 18. The second window will be May 1-15.
It is absolutely stunning how many proven players, including starters, are entering their names in the portal.
Of course the reason why the transfer portal has exploded is the fact that no longer do players who transfer from one school to another have to sit out a year. Instead, players are now immediately eligible and that’s why the transfer portal has absolutely gone bonkers in the last few years.
Not only is it out of control, but some of the players who enter the portal just leave you scratching your head.
Take Notre Dame football for example.
After the 8-4 Irish regular season concluded, they lost their starting quarterback – Drew Pyne. Pyne opted to take his services to Arizona State. No. 21 Notre Dame will face No. 19 South Carolina Dec. 30 in the Gator Bowl.
Not good enough for Pyne, who is headed to a team that finished 3-9 this season, and is as much of an afterthought as any in the Pac-12.
I mean come on … you are the starting QB at Notre Dame and you are leaving. Pyne is a marginal NFL talent and he’s just going to trash a Notre Dame degree. Pyne’s decision makes absolutely no sense to me. Perhaps he’s concerned who Marcus Freeman brings in to compete with him at the quarterback position. That’s a head scratcher to say the least.
Purdue had a starting offensive lineman – Spencer Holstege – announced after the Big Ten Championship Game loss to Michigan he was jumping into the portal. He will head to UCLA and have two years of eligibility remaining. Interestingly enough, the Bruins will begin playing in the Big Ten in 2024.
For a school like Purdue, the transfer portal will be vital this off-season especially since more than half a dozen of its high school recruits have decommitted following Jeff Brohm’s departure to Louisville.
Now, Purdue and new coach Ryan Walters can rebuild its team via the portal.
That’s because in 2021, new regulations were adopted that allow student-athletes in Division I football, men’s and women’s basketball, men’s ice hockey and baseball to change schools using the portal once without sitting out a year after the transfer.
The transfer portal is so out of control and depleting teams’ rosters, especially for bowl games, that the NCAA issued a one-time blanket waiver in FBS football, to exempt postseason participation from the limit of 4 contests a student-athlete may participate in without using a season of competition. The waiver is applicable to FBS postseason games that occur after Dec. 15.
So, in other words teams can have players that were redshirting in 2022 play in their bowl games and not lose a year of elibibility.
Yes, the portal has changed the way college football teams reconstruct their rosters.
Tomorrow – Dec. 21 – college football teams will officially sign high school players as part of the early signing period for their recruiting classes, and on the first Wednesday of February – Feb. 1 – schools will sign players to finalize their 2023 classes.
It’s sad, however, because the national signing dates have really been put on the back burner because to be honest how well teams do plucking players out of the transfer portal will be the difference between winning and losing at least in the short term.
Personally, I think something has to be done and done quickly to rectify this craziness. At the very least, prior rules stating players have to sit out one season if they transfer must be re-implemented.
Do I think that will happen? No. I believe the craziness of the transfer portal is here to stay. I guess we shouldn’t be surprised because it’s yet another measure to make college sports resemble professional sports in every way possible.
So this holiday season, sit back and enjoy college sports version of free agency gone wild.
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