IU fans, save your portal panic. This is college football now.
BLOOMINGTON – Several notable Indiana football players made their way swiftly into the transfer portal — or at least the queue for it — in the wake of Tom Allen’s firing Sunday.
Myles Jackson announced his intention to enter the portal after playing more than 300 defensive snaps in 2023. Quarterbacks Brendan Sorsby and Dexter Williams, who each signed with Allen out of high school, made similar declarations on social media later in the afternoon. Monday morning, more Hoosiers followed them in, including standout receiver Donaven McCulley.
The angst that accompanies players moving en masse toward the portal is understandable. In moments like this, it is premature. Concern shouldn’t revolve around which players hit the portal when it opens Dec. 4, but which players the next coach can (or can’t) pull back out of it.
Some of this is the nature of a coaching change, obviously.
Players buy into a program because of its coach — especially, in Indiana’s case, this coach — its scheme and a long-term vision for said players’ development. When that coach is fired, the scheme is turned over and the vision is disrupted, it’s only natural for players to consider their own futures. They’ve never had more control over that than they do right now, so the path to the portal is inevitably going to get worn out in these situations.
But even without a coaching change, there’s still an extent to which this is just the way November and December work in college football.
Even Allen, in his news conference directly following the season-ending loss to Purdue, spoke about re-recruiting his own roster. Nearly every coach in America now knows the first priority of any offseason is locking down what of his own locker room he can, before turning his attention outward.
“We used to go out and recruit tomorrow,” Allen said, referring to the Sunday after the regular season ends. “Now, we go out and recruit our own team tomorrow.”
It’s never been easier for players to test their own value and appeal than it is now. Name, image and likeness rules have helped quantify that value, and the portal provides an avenue for testing it.
Does it make life more difficult for coaches in the modern game? Absolutely. Are there risks involved for players entering the portal? Of course.
It is reality, though, and not simply because Indiana fired its coach, or this coach, or because of the timing. The winter portal window is a layer to the offseason that will affect virtually everyone, and is emphatically here to stay.
What will matter now, to Indiana, is how many of the Hoosiers who enter the portal the next head coach wants back, and how many of those he can convince to return. That’s where IU’s doubleddown commitment to football-specific NIL resources will be crucial. The Hoosiers’ next head coach should have millions, plural, to lean on in that effort. It will be up to them to make the most of it.
The time to worry will be when — or, given this remains hypothetical for now, if — said coach is struggling in the coming weeks to pull together a solid roster from players he returns, players he tries to convince to come back to Bloomington out of the portal, and external recruits he wants brought in the door.
For now, what’s playing out with Indiana’s roster reflects little more than a modern, if for fans understandably unsettling, trend in college football. One intensified by the coaching change but by no means created by it.
The time to worry will be on the back end of this process. For now, Indiana’s just in the river with everyone else.