The NCAA created a big mess by opening up a can of worms with little to no advanced planning. The four-letter “non-profit” threw its constituents a bone by giving them the transfer portal and NIL. It turned into an avalanche of lawsuits that threaten the entity’s existence.
You cannot put the toothpaste back into the tube, but you can spread that toothpaste out more evenly over a couple of brushes. Right now, the sport of college football has an entire tube of toothpaste on the brush for the month of December.
After the Super Bowl, the NFL has free agency in March, followed by the draft in late April. College football ends its regular season. Less than a week later, it holds its draft (Early Signing Period), then begins its one-month free agency period (transfer portal), most of which is wrapped up before the postseason concludes.
It’s a damn mess.
The calendar is unsustainable. The powers that be tried to alleviate strain on college football coaches by moving up the Early Signing Period to the first Wednesday in December. It removed in-home visits from the recruiting process, but gave coaches more time to specifically focus on securing visits and landing players from the transfer portal.
This year’s transfer portal opened on Monday, Dec. 9. There was also a second window following spring practice. Both are subject to change and there is growing momentum around the sport to make it happen.
Transfer Portal Potential Changes
Earlier this year at the AFCA Convention, coaches lobbied to eliminate the spring transfer portal window. I think most would agree that the sport can still operate successfully with just one transfer portal window. The biggest question is when will the transfer portal open and who will make that decision? Kirby Smart has some thoughts.
“I think it’d be a great question to ask some people, but my opinion is the implementation committee, which comes from the settlement,” Smart said from the SEC spring meetings in Destin. “Appointed [10] ADs, two from each Power conference, who hear the conference’s perspective. And ultimately, those [10] ADs – which are appointed coming off the settlement – will have to make a lot of implementation decisions that are not part of the settlement. The ‘nuggets,’ let’s call it. Here’s the settlement, and then the nuggets are going to come from these [10] ADs.”
Kentucky’s Mitch Barnhart would be among the ten who would make that decision. Smart made a case for opening up the transfer portal in January.
January makes sense on the football calendar, only interfering with a few teams still playing in the CFP, but it interferes with the academic calendar. Unless schools make changes, there isn’t enough time to transfer schools before spring semesters begin.
Greg Sankey made it clear that SEC coaches want the transfer portal in January. Big Ten coaches are lobbying for March or April, and there’s one more proposal.
A May transfer portal date has been kicked around by some administrators. It makes the most logical sense in this humble blogger’s opinion. It’s the only vacant month on the calendar, and it would give the sport a nice kick in the news cycle during an otherwise dull time, right before the start of the official college football new year at spring meetings. However, coaches don’t want their future players working out at other schools in the spring. They want them on campus ASAP.
Changes are coming to the transfer portal, and like so many changes in college football, there are no easy answers.
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