I intensely dislike the portal for reasons made clear in this article in The Athletic. I think the implications for hs football are already pretty clear.
Transfer portal chaos is overwhelming the college football calendar — and it’s going to get worse
By
David Ubben
College football’s calendar offers a uniquely chaotic challenge. And it’s about to get worse.
On Friday, a 15-day window opened for coaches to freely contact and visit high school recruits. On Saturday, most of the sport’s conference championship games were played, with spots in the College Football Playoff at stake.
On Sunday, the CFP announced the four-team field, and bowl participants learned their matchups.
On Monday,
the transfer portal opened, and by lunchtime on the East Coast,
more than 350 players had entered.
In two weeks, high school prospects in the Class of 2024 can begin signing their national letters of intent, and the vast majority of the nation’s top prospects will do so.
Plenty of things about college football have never made sense. But now, with the sport having its own version of free agency via the
portal, college football is particularly ill-equipped. In the middle of all the transfer chaos: a little thing we call the College Football Playoff.
Only college football would conduct its offseason in the middle of its postseason. And next year, adding a 12-team Playoff will make a messy situation only messier.
College football is not a pro sport, no matter how much more it resembles one by the day. Pro sports are pure business. College sports pretend to be non-profit and are still inextricably tied to an academic calendar.
That makes finding solutions difficult. And for most players who decide to transfer, it means leaving campuses at the end of the fall semester and trying to find new ones by the time the spring semester begins. Most want to maximize their immediate impact, and that means enrolling before spring practice begins.
One of the biggest names to enter the portal on Monday was
Ohio State starting quarterback Kyle McCord. If this was 2024, he’d be preparing for a Playoff game now but clearly might still need to enter the portal at season’s end. Next year, already tiny windows for decision-making will get even smaller.
This is what happens when a sport has no central leadership making decisions for the good of the sport on behalf of the people within it. If college sports had been proactive about allowing player movement, we might not be here.
But the reactionary leadership focused on hopes of avoiding costly lawsuits that would lead to athletes becoming employees and implode the outdated economic structure of the sport.
If the NCAA, which is simply the schools, tried to tighten any of the rule changes that have given players more freedom and more earning power, it would be served with a lawsuit in weeks, if not days. And lawyers would point to
the Alston decision as a precedent when the Supreme Court ruled unanimously against the NCAA’s ability to limit players’ education-related compensation.
It’s a problem with no path to a meaningful solution. Even if athletes eventually are made employees — likely a question of when, rather than if — the academic calendar still looms.
Pro sports don’t have to tackle this. The
NFL? The
NBA? Their calendars make sense. In the NBA, the Finals end in mid-June. A few days to a week or so later, the draft is held. Two weeks later, free agency begins.
In the NFL, the season ends in February, and free agency begins in March. The draft happens in late April. Roster building is separate from the people on the roster trying to win games and championships.
It used to be mostly like this in college football.
Bowl season held a bit more meaning than it does now, and coaches could focus mostly on high school recruiting in December while they prepared for the bowls.
The season ended, and coaching staffs sprinted to the finish line with last-minute recruiting efforts before national signing day in February. But the sport gradually backed itself into a chaotic situation that benefits no one.
It added the early signing period in 2017, with the intent of shortening the recruiting process for prospects who knew which schools they wanted to attend. Almost immediately, it killed the buzz and excitement for what used to be National Signing Day. Most meaningful roster additions now are done by December, squeezed in the week before Christmas when teams are preparing for bowl games. This year, programs will have their classes largely wrapped on Dec. 20.
The day that does still have juice happened Monday when a flood of big-name quarterbacks highlighted the opening of the portal, college football’s newest roster-building holiday.
In 2021, the NCAA eliminated the requirement for transfers to sit out a season, giving all graduate transfers and first-time transfers immediate eligibility after leaving their current schools. The cost of leaving has never been lower. The benefits have never been higher. All three of the
quarterbacks who are Heisman Trophy finalists this year began their careers elsewhere. And Nebraska coach Matt Rhule made headlines last week when he correctly said out loud that top-tier quarterbacks will earn between $1 million and $2 million.
Cruising the portal is now integral to roster building, giving coaches the ability to fill holes in their rosters by signing players who can make an immediate impact. Players can boost their own NIL (name, image and likeness) earnings by jumping from one school to another, earning more playing time or finding a better situation.
It’s so important that programs making coaching changes are heavily incentivized to have a new head coach or coordinator in place by the time the portal opens so they can be best positioned to lure players from the portal and keep their own players out of it. It moved up the coaching carousel calendar to earlier in the year than ever.
College staffs have to scout players whose names have entered and ideally, host them on visits. Players have to field dozens of calls, sort through their contenders and find time to make visits before another player grabs an open scholarship.
Most often, the process begins and ends in a few weeks, a far cry from the patience of high school recruiting that usually takes place for one to three years and features official visits for months and as many unofficial visits as players can afford to take.
Next year, 12 coaching staffs will be preparing for Playoff games six days after the portal opens.
Players on teams in the Playoff either can hold their decisions to enter the portal and further rush a hectic decision-making process or leave the team, hurt their teammates’ chances of success and be branded as quitters.
Meanwhile, coaching staffs are left to juggle preparing for more meaningful postseason games, recruiting high schools, re-recruiting their rosters to stay out of the portal while scouting and recruiting players in the portal throughout December.
Coaches can’t give full attention to roster building or winning the most meaningful games that decide how a coach, team and season are remembered. Both are of equal importance.
Some players are making portal decisions without ever visiting their future homes.
Maybe the season could move a bit earlier to allow some relief, but college football is always going to claim New Year’s Day as its postseason holiday, and the January national title game isn’t moving in the 12-team Playoff era.
Free agency in college football is here. But the calendar isn’t built to accommodate it. And the result is a chaotic month that will be worse this time next year.
pittsburghsportsnow.com