Transfer portal adds another dimension
Burrow, Fields, Hurts part of the trend tied to early signing period
As LSU quarterback Joe Burrow celebrated winning the Heisman Trophy Saturday night, one can only wonder what might have been in the cards for Burrow and the Tigers if not for the transfer portal.
The same could be said for Ohio State or Oklahoma, both of which benefited from the portal while landing transfer quarterbacks Justin Fields and Jalen Hurts, respectively. In fact, three of the four teams in the College Football Playoff semifinals will be guided by quarterbacks who transferred swiftly with the help of the portal.
While coaching staffs spend countless hours on the recruiting trail looking for the future building blocks of their programs, more and more are spending time scouring the portal for a player who can make or break a football season.
It’s quickly becoming a huge factor when breaking down a recruiting class, according to Adam Gorney, who is the national recruiting analyst for Rivals.com and Yahoo Sports.
“Coaches now have to look at it
two ways: they have to figure out who can be in the transfer portal that could help them, so they have to keep a set number of scholarships for those kids,” Gorney said. “Coaches will use the transfer portal for immediate success or to fix a problem that they don’t have two or three years to fix.
“The second part of that is figuring out who on your team is unhappy and might enter the transfer portal.”
The list of names in the transfer portal grows longer each day and in cases like Michigan, which saw receiver Tarik Black enter his name into the database last week, it can quickly throw a coaching staff in a different direction.
Gorney points to a similar situation at Texas Tech, where backup quarterback Jett Duffy, who stepped in for the injured sophomore Alan Bowman this season, also entered the portal last week. That move could force the Red Raiders coaching staff to reevaluate their focus coming down the wire heading into the start of the early signing period Wednesday.
“All of these things play in as a factor for coaches but also for recruits looking at this,” Gorney said.
“Spencer Rattler is a five-star quarterback that went to Oklahoma and he should be next in line when Jalen Hurts leaves and he’s a very talented kid, but Oklahoma has a history of bringing in transfer quarterbacks.
Tate Martell was probably going to be the starter at Ohio State if not for Justin Fields transferring and getting in there. Washington had a bunch of young kids competing for that job when Jake Browning left until Jacob Eason came in.
“What [would] the situation … have been like at LSU if Joe Burrow had not transferred in from Ohio State?”
Coaches can only offer 25 scholarships per recruiting cycle under NCAA rules, which is why more and more of them are keeping a few aside in case they find a player in the portal who could fill a big hole immediately on the roster.
The transfer portal has also taken the pressure off recruits when it comes to the early signing period.
“Most of them are going to be going early and the reason is because of the portal now, where the kids don’t have as much pressure figuring, ‘Hey if I don’t like it, I’ll leave right away and get into the portal and play right away at a different school rather than sitting out a year,” CBS Sports Network recruiting analyst Tom Lemming said. “That’s helped the kids now taking away a bit of the anxiety of jumping too early. If they don’t like it, they’ll leave in a year.”
USC’s top recruit from its 2019 class, Bru McCoy, entered the transfer portal already despite enrolling in classes on campus. He later landed at Texas where he remained briefly before transferring back to USC. He couldn’t play this season.