Welcome to the era of unlimited transfers in college football.
Administrators and coaches have been putting it off for as long as possible, but it’s here. The rules limiting players to one transfer with immediate eligibility have been suspended since December and will likely be eliminated this week. Transfers are up almost 20 percent among FBS scholarship players from this time last year. The average Power 5 team has signed more than 10 transfers this offseason. And the spring transfer window opens on Tuesday.
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In this evolving portal era, programs take different approaches to attacking that opportunity. Everyone must decide who they want to be when it comes to transfer recruiting, finding a strategy that fits their institution and ambition. As the action resumes, here’s a closer look at the five prominent styles of portal shopping you’ll see in the next two weeks.
The NIL barons
If these guys have offered, you’re out of luck. The programs that do the best job in portal recruiting aren’t always the ones operating with the most NIL money, and players don’t always pick the highest bidder. But those that spend the most tend to get who they want.
“If you have good player relationships and if you have a collective that’s run really well,” Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin said, “you then stand a chance in this portal world.”
In December and January, the schools consistently battling and setting the market for elite transfers were Oregon, Texas, Ole Miss and Ohio State. The Buckeyes clearly stepped up this offseason and sent a message by landing Alabama safety Caleb Downs and Ole Miss running back Quinshon Judkins. One SEC personnel staffer noted Florida State and Louisville were highly competitive as well when they locked in on players and that Texas A&M became a threat again after coach Mike Elko’s arrival.
The collective model has put more programs in position to go get the key player they covet, like Miami adding quarterback Cameron Ward or Missouri bringing in tackle Cayden Green. But it’s worth noting that some of the strongest collectives aren’t necessarily all-in on portal recruiting and overpaying for transfers. The list of perceived biggest spenders fluctuates from year to year.
Georgia and Alabama continue to be in a class of their own. They usually don’t take many transfers, but the few they add will be legit. Sometimes these recruitments are over before they even begin. New Alabama coach Kalen DeBoer could have room to add a few more this spring, but he’ll be selective like his predecessor. Ole Miss’ expertise in portal recruiting has helped the Rebels catch up to those two SEC powers, but Kiffin acknowledged that’s always a moving target.
“It closes the gap, but then at times it doesn’t,” Kiffin said. “You might be like, ‘Hey, this is the year they don’t really have an elite running back.’ But then they go get Jahmyr Gibbs (from Georgia Tech).”
The portal enthusiasts
These programs have effectively embraced portal recruiting as a key element of building a contender, signing double-digit transfers on a consistent basis. When it’s time to compete for the top available players in the portal, you can usually expect to see Ole Miss, Florida State, USC, Oklahoma and TCU among the schools in the mix. All five have proven that the portal can seriously speed up a turnaround.
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Mike Norvell’s four-year flip of Florida State, from 3-6 in 2020 to 13-1 last fall, was a great feat of modern roster construction. The Seminoles had nine transfers make All-ACC teams last year, and it’s likely nine or 10 will get drafted later this month. How did Norvell get it right? By establishing a winning culture before he loaded up on impact transfers.
In their first two years, before the roster rules changed, he and his staff had to build carefully. “Every person you brought into the program, you had to be right,” Norvell said. What that required was a willingness to say no to talented players who didn’t fit. That’s a tough thing to do after consecutive losing seasons, but it yielded the transfers FSU needed to make the leap from five wins to 10 in 2022.
The Seminoles have won battles for big-time talent like Keon Coleman, Jared Verse and Jermaine Johnson, but they’ve thrived by finding hidden gems as well. Norvell points out that Johnny Wilson had 18 career receptions at Arizona State, Trey Benson had six career carries at Oregon and Dillan Gibbons made one start at Notre Dame. All three developed into All-ACC performers. Stacking up that many success stories has made them a destination.
“When guys go into the portal, if it’s a potential fit, there’s definitely a lot of excitement on their end because we have the experiences,” Norvell said. “We can point to the guys that have been in similar situations and came in with all the hopes and dreams of what they wanted to accomplish here – and they were able to do that and even more here at Florida State.”
There are many more programs — such as South Carolina, Arkansas, Miami, Tennessee, UCLA, Kentucky and UCF — that have benefited from high-quality transfer portal hauls. In this new 12-team playoff era, we’re going to find out whether a portal-heavy approach can lead to a national title.
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This blueprint is working at the Group of 5 level, too. SMU won the AAC last season with 13 transfers in the starting lineup and has brought in 56 transfers over the last three years. Liberty went all the way to the Fiesta Bowl in its first year under Jamey Chadwell with the help of 10 transfer starters.
The desperate portalers
These programs are in Year 1 or Year 2 under new coaches and don’t really have a choice. Rosters get raided during coaching transitions. The 30-day window to transfer that players receive as soon as a coach exits means attrition can hit hard before the new guy even shows up.
Deion Sanders and Colorado grabbed all the headlines last spring for their dramatic roster shakeup, but that was forced attrition. Most first-year coaches going all-in on the portal are just trying to make up for what they lost. At Arizona State, Kenny Dillingham had to replace more than half of his roster in a matter of months and coached 78 newcomers during his debut season.
“We literally wouldn’t have been able to field a team without them,” Dillingham said.
Dillingham knew it would be a tough start, but he had to get back to a more normal roster balance of old and young. The Sun Devils lost 17 of their 19 freshman signees from their 2021 and ‘22 classes. Their staff has specifically targeted players with multiple years of eligibility remaining and brought in 23 more transfers this offseason to continue to fill the void.
Louisville and Texas State thrived in Year 1 thanks to deep portal classes. This year, it’s the new coaches at Texas A&M (24 incoming transfers), Indiana (22), UTEP (21), Houston (18) and San Diego State (17) who are leading the way and hoping that sharp evaluations can flip their fortunes in Year 1.
“You’ve gotta remember, when you get better faster, what are you sacrificing?” Dillingham said. “Are you sacrificing the future? What’s the correct speed to get better so you do show improvement, which allows you to recruit the future, but you’re also not sacrificing it? I think there’s a balance with that. Because everybody just wants you to win. Do they want you to win Year 1 or Year 2, or do they want you to win Year 4 through 9? My method and my goal is to win and create something sustainable here, not something that’s a flash in the pan.”
Let’s not forget the other end of the desperation spectrum: Coaches on the hot seat who hope the portal can deliver a quick fix. If that strategy works, they may have to become portal enthusiasts — whether they like it or not. If it doesn’t work, the next coach usually inherits a mess.
The need-based portalers
This is the old-fashioned way — some would say the right way — of utilizing the transfer portal. Many Power 5 coaches still look at transfers as more supplement than substitute. They don’t want to live and die by the portal. They like who they’ve got and only try to resolve needs at specific positions caused by issues like injuries, early draft entries or surprise attrition.
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The belief that the way to win is signing around 20 high schoolers and five to 10 transfers per class still seems like a sound one. Among the teams in the final AP Top 25 rankings, 13 took this approach going into 2023: Michigan, Washington, Texas, Alabama, Missouri, Ohio State, Arizona, Penn State, Notre Dame, Tennessee, Kansas State, NC State and Iowa. In this year’s cycle, nine of those 13 are in that same five-to-10 transfers range.
Kansas State has had more hits than misses with its portal recruiting, but Chris Klieman is never looking to sign too many.
“I’m gonna still have a developmental program,” Klieman said. “We need to have kids here for four or five years for us to be successful. Our locker room is in a really good place because we have kids that are here for four or five years. The transfers that come in, they make the locker room better because they’re the right kind of guys.”
Look at how it paid off for Michigan. The Wolverines don’t need to shop in the portal most years, but they loaded up for a CFP title run in 2023 with nine incoming transfers and didn’t whiff on any of them. That’s a rational approach to take, especially for programs that don’t (or can’t) make big spends on coveted transfers: Chase short-term pickups when they make sense.
When it’s portal season, these programs do tend to have to play a lot of defense in fighting off poachers and persuading their guys to stay. K-State didn’t wrap up spring ball until Saturday, but last week Klieman was already having end-of-spring exit meetings with many of his top players.
“I’m not gonna wait until Monday,” he said. “It could be too late.”
The portal denier
Clemson remains the outlier in the portal recruiting world. Dabo Swinney is not changing his ways.
His dedication to the evaluation, retention and development of high school recruits has yielded two national championships. Sure, Clemson has extended offers to a small number of transfers in recent years, primarily plug-and-play offensive linemen, but backup QBs Hunter Johnson and Paul Tyson have been the program’s only transfer additions in the past three years.
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Imagine how many players would want to transfer to Clemson with its staff, infrastructure, trophies and NFL Draft picks. The Tigers would likely be doing well in this pool if they ever cared to jump in. They’ve dealt with attrition like everyone else, with 33 scholarship players transferring out since the end of the 2021 season. Still, Swinney is doing what he believes is best for his program culture.
“We’ve just always wanted to be slow and right than fast and wrong,” Swinney told reporters this month. “We’ve made some mistakes in the past like anybody. You’re never going to bat 1.000. We just think the biggest thing is we know the fit here.”
Clemson is the only Power 5 program that has signed zero transfers this offseason. Iowa has typically been very selective with transfers in recent years and only took one this offseason: five-star tackle Kadyn Proctor, who has already bailed to go back to Alabama. The list of programs on the low end of transfer commitments so far includes Michigan (two), Stanford (two), Northwestern (three) and Virginia Tech (four). Some schools have stricter transfer standards than others, though it’s notable new Northwestern coach David Braun has mostly stayed out of the portal despite the program losing 14 scholarship transfers since July. We’ll see whether the spring window changes the calculus for a few of these teams.
When the NCAA approves unlimited transfers and this becomes full-on free agency, it’ll be even tougher for programs to avoid portal recruiting altogether. Plenty of coaches have similar philosophies to Swinney when it comes to constructing their roster but have conceded they need transfers to improve and sustain.
“You can’t lose guys and then just replace them with high school freshmen,” Oklahoma State coach Mike Gundy said last year. “You’re going to have a team full of young kids and you’ll get your ass kicked for two years. That’s the difficult part.”
Editor’s note: This is part of a series of stories examining the transfer portal, NIL and their impact on college sports. The spring football transfer portal window is open from April 16-30. Find all transfer portal stories here.
(Top illustration: Sean Reilly for The Athletic; Photos: Harry How, Jonathan Bachman. Isaiah Vazquez, Christopher Hook, Brian Rothmuller / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
