Transfer portal key to 2023 rebuild
Freshman-heavy team has chance to add experience
COLLEGE STATION — Texas A&M coach Jimbo Fisher offered late this season that “there’s no substitute for maturity and age and development.”
Fisher is acutely aware of the matter, considering he played 25 true freshmen of the class of 29 during the Aggies’ 5-7 season that included not making a bowl for the first time since 2008.
The difference between today and two years ago, however, is coaches now must figure out how to win with plenty of players that began maturing in college under a different coach.
As of Monday the NCAA transfer portal is in full swing, making Fisher a busy man even while not preparing for a bowl.
“It can be good or it can be bad, it can be anything,” Fisher said when asked if this still-new era of free-for-all transfers is good or bad for the game.
A&M, fresh off its worst season in 14 years, dearly needs it to be good this holiday season to be competitive in 2023, with what should be a more advantageous schedule than 2022.
As of Tuesday evening the Aggies had at least 18 scholarship players entering the portal, including the subtractions on Tuesday of linebackers Andre White and Tarian Lee at a position of need. A&M also intends to draw from the portal much more than in the last couple of years, out of necessity.
A year ago the Aggies signed quarterback Max Johnson from LSU out of the portal. The Aggies figure to times that number
by about 10 this time around.
“You look at every high school kid out there, and you look at everybody in the portal,” Fisher said of his approach to recruiting in this new era. “And if they can help your team, yeah (you sign them).”
One of a frustrated Fisher’s many gripes during a bad season that included a 2-6 SEC record was how some players across the country already appear to know their destination before entering the portal.
“When a guy gets in the portal and knows where he’s going … if they stay in the portal a while you can recruit guys, but if they’re in the portal for (only) one day how do you recruit him and how do you know they’re going in?” Fisher said. “To know that, you’d have to be doing what? Tampering. We’re not going to do that and we ain’t ever going to do that.”
So what can be done about what Fisher alleges is meddling by other programs?
“That’s not for me, that’s for the NCAA,” he
said.
In any case A&M’S coach who’s paid more than $9 million annually to figure out such solutions in this new world of college football is expected to dig deep into the portal this time around to add depth or even starters at linebacker and on the offensive line in particular. And he intends to be quick about it.
“Guys don’t stay in the portal a long, long time, it doesn’t seem to be,” Fisher said. “… If they’re in the portal for a while and you get them on a visit, that’s great. If they already know where they’re going, that can be a problem.”
The NCAA in 2021 adopted a one-time transfer rule that allows athletes to change programs without sitting out a season. Athletes, too, are using the newfound opportunities to understandably capitalize on another still-new NCAA rule: benefiting financially from their name, image or likeness (NIL).
A&M to date has done a decent job of keeping its top-rated 2022 recruiting class intact early in transfer season, although it has had some attrition. The Aggies signed eight five-star prospects, a class highlighted by defensive lineman Walter Nolen and quarterback Conner Weigman, but defensive back Denver Harris has entered the transfer portal and receiver Chris Marshall might not return following an indefinite suspension among that group.
Harris, Marshall, offensive lineman PJ Williams and defensive lineman Anthony Lucas, all freshmen, were indefinitely suspended by A&M after they were caught smoking marijuana in the visitors locker room following the Aggies’ 30-24 loss at South Carolina on Oct. 22, according to multiple insiders.
Williams, arrested last month in College Station on a separate charge involving marijuana, also has entered the portal. He was expected to be a big part of the Aggies’ plans on the offensive line moving forward, and that is one area needing big-time addressing in the portal.
The Aggies, too, are down to a handful of linebackers following the pending exits of White and Lee, and after A&M already had one of the nation’s worst run defenses this season (124th out of 131 FBS programs) in allowing 209 yards per game on the ground.
“There’s no magical formula,” Fisher said of developing a winning program.
That formula now includes continuing to develop players who’ve already been developing in another program, however, and are angling for more snaps or perhaps merely a change of scenery. One thing is certain, for better or worse for A&M Fans: The Aggies’ roster will look noticeably different than it did in 2022.