Transfer Portal the Amazon of collegiate players

His final spring practice in his first year as Western Illinois’ head football coach was barely completed on Friday night before Joe Davis was already talking about going shopping.
The spring window of the NCAA’s transfer portal for football had been open for just a few days, but Davis knew he had to start looking for our help as he tries to rebuild a program at the FCS level that hasn’t won a game in the last two seasons.
“I think that the reality of this level of football is that the transfer portal is very significant,” Davis said. “Our focus now shifts to that. We have some areas on our team that we need to address via the transfer portal. I think we need to get better.”
For Davis, and coaches like him around every college sport these days, the portal is like Amazon.
Need a player at a certain position? Take a look at a wide variety of selections from around the nation.
The days of having an athlete in your program for four years of eligibility are long gone, and it doesn’t matter the sport.
It used to be that once you were a member of a college team, you couldn’t transfer without having to sit out a year unless you could get some sort of waiver from the NCAA. Slowly, over time, that changed, but the changes have come more quickly in the last couple of years. The NCAA has modified its transfer restrictions, or had them wiped out all together by court rulings that have favored an athlete’s right to move.
When the NCAA announced last week that from now on, athletes could transfer on a yearly basis without penalty, the odds of having a player make the full journey in one program from freshman to a senior seem long these days.
Adam Jardy, a sports writer for the Columbus Dispatch who covers Ohio State, said on social media site X on Monday that, according to his calculations, 57 Big Ten men’s basketball players are in the transfer portal, which is 31.3 percent of the scholarship players with eligibility remaining in the conference. That’s one in three players looking for a new school.
The website Verbal Commits, which tracks men’s basketball transfers, has, as of Monday, 1,700 NCAA Division I players in the portal. Again, that figures out to almost one in every three men’s basketball players with eligibility wanting to transfer.
The portal now makes it easier for a coach like Davis to find experienced players to build his roster. Forty-three players at the FBS level, including many from conferences like the Big Ten and Big 12, had entered the portal just on Monday, so the choices to find players who want playing time are great.
“We still don’t have the depth we need to compete in the (Ohio Valley Conference),” Davis said. “Even from a skill position standpoint, we’re not long enough or fast enough yet. But those are things we’re going to focus on here in the portal. We’ve already focused on it from a freshman standpoint, the class that we have coming in the fall.”
The portal, though, can be a revolving door for teams at the lower levels of Division I. Recruit a freshman and develop them, and odds are good that the player will be snatched by a power-conference team looking for experienced help.
Iowa’s men’s basketball program, for example, signed point guard Drew Thelwell last week from OVC school Morehead State. Thelwell, who has one year of eligibility remaining, takes the place of Tony Perkins, who entered the portal and transferred to Missouri for his last year of eligibility.
The contrast between the mid-major and major conference teams was evident a day after Davis spoke, when Iowa coach Kirk Ferentz talked on Saturday about how his staff was going to use the transfer portal now that the Hawkeyes have finished their spring practice.
“We have done our due diligence,” Ferentz said. “One nice thing about spring practice is we don’t have game prep. We have some hours outside of our meetings where we can kind of watch that stuff.”
The most interesting thing is right now Iowa’s roster resembles an oversold flight. The Hawkeyes are four players over the 85-scholarship limit, a number that doesn’t have to be reached until the beginning of fall camp.
Ferentz didn’t rule out a summer of transactions, expecting that he’ll lose players while also picking up a couple here or there who can boost the team’s depth.
“We’ll do anything we can to help our team,” he said. “We’ll be looking at that, studying it, and if there’s an opportunity that presents itself that makes sense, we’ll consider it. If there’s something that will make us a better football team, that’s what we’re all trying to do.”
Davis, who came to WIU after time as offensive coordinator at Eastern Illinois, is trying to do the same thing, only with a bigger shopping list.
“I mentioned many times that at Eastern, I thought we attacked that transfer portal a little bit uniquely, and it helped us quickly,” he said. “And I think we can do the same thing at Western.”
John Bohnenkamp is an award-winning writer/columnist and is a regular contributor to Pen City Current.