NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WTVF — Welcome to the wild, wild west of college sports. The new age of recruiting in a world where athletes are now able to profit off their name, image and likeness and free to transfer at any time.
The athletes’ newfound freedom has resulted in a never ending cycle of recruiting and re-recruiting for coaches. You’ve heard of March Madness. This is transfer portal madness.
“If someone had told me (about) this in the early 2000’s I’d say that’s not college athletics,” Vanderbilt baseball coach Tim Corbin said. “That’s someone’s system on professional sport. I’m all for rewarding kids with finances that will help them pay for school and lessen the burden on their parents. But at the same time when you open up a system where you’re paying kids to play and give them free reign to go where they want to go at any point in time, you have a system with no guardrails.”
In a world that once emphasized amateur student-athletes, prohibiting players from any form of payment, the new system involving NIL – and soon revenue sharing – may seem unrecognizable.
For many coaches their concern is not over the payment of hard-working athletes, but rather the ease in which those players can now leave their programs under the NCAA’s new anytime transfer rule.
“It’s so bizarre that we’re talking about 18- to 22-year-old athletes that have access to the amount of money that they do now with no rules,” Belmont basketball coach Casey Alexander said. “There’s not a job anywhere – your job, my job – where there’s not a contract or there’s not obligations or there’s not some parameter.”
Once upon a time players were required to sit out a year if they transferred to a new school. But late last year seven state Attorneys General filed a lawsuit that forced the NCAA to change its rules to allow immediate eligibility for athletes in good academic standing no matter how many times they transfer.
Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti was part of the coalition that filed the lawsuit. He says athletes need to be afforded the same rights as other students at college, which means they can choose to transfer every year if they want to.
“With the transfer portal, there’s just so much movement it takes some of the character out of college athletics,” Skrmetti admitted, before asserting that the law prohibits transfer restrictions. “But you can’t force them to stay, you have to incentivize them to stay. They have to make the choice to stay.”
Which brings it back to the money. With players now able to make money through NIL payments from university-affiliated collectives, schools find themselves in yearly recruiting battles for players.
In many cases, coaches find themselves re-recruiting their own roster and even getting into bidding wars with other schools to try to keep their best players.
“In this neighborhood everyone wants to talk about the Peyton Manning number 16 jerseys and the he should be able to benefit from that,” Alexander said. “I don’t think any of us disagree with that at this point in time. But coaches are smart and that quickly turned into how we can take advantage of this.”
Alexander says the open transfer portal has changed NIL from its original intent. Instead of high-profile players benefiting from organic sponsorship deals with a local car dealership or sandwich shop, many players are now receiving no-strings attached payments from collectives just for playing at their school.
There have been allegations of schools contacting other teams’ players through third parties during the season to gauge their interest in transferring, and even making comments to players in handshake lines after games.
“At least in the old days when things were going on under the table it was much harder to hide $1 million dollars, so it had to be smaller transactions,” Belmont athletic director Scott Corley said. “Now it’s legal, it’s open and you’ve seen the passion from a lot of these fanbases where it’s $1 million to get a starting center.”
This past year nearly 4,000 football players and more than 2,000 basketball players entered the NCAA’s transfer portal. Perhaps no school was hit harder than Belmont, which lost a trio of All-Missouri Valley Conference players to bigger, richer schools.
Ja’Kobi Gillespie, Malik Dia and Cade Tyson were the only trio in the country last year to each average 16 points per game scoring or more. With all three having two years of eligibility remaining, Belmont appeared to be building a powerhouse team. But it’s becoming increasingly common for players like that to seek greener pastures and Gillespie quickly announced his intention to transfer to Maryland.
Dia then left for Ole Miss and Tyson transferred to North Carolina in April, sending Alexander back to the drawing board to rebuild his team.
“We’ve kept a lot of kids at Belmont through the years because we have a great product and offer a great opportunity and win a lot of games, and exposure and everything else,” Alexander said. “But when you combine the (higher) level with the financial opportunities that are out there, we do pretty much resign ourselves that it’s out of our control entirely.”
The lack of guardrails for movement and compensation has resulted in the most player-friendly free agency in all of sports. Professional athletes face salary caps when they are first drafted and then sign contracts before they can negotiate bigger money deals. College athletes can now seek the highest bidder every year with no restraints.
They’re taking advantage of the freedom. According to On3, nearly 30% of the top 100 football recruits since 2021 have transferred one or more times. Last year’s men’s basketball Final Four featured 19 transfers. National champion UConn’s leading scorers, Tristen Newton and Cam Spencer, were both transfers. N.C. State’s entire starting lineup started their careers at other schools, while Alabama had four transfers in its starting lineup.
The use of the transfer portal has diminished the importance of high school recruiting with coaches now able to address needs immediately with proven, experienced players. There’s an argument to be made that with recruiting the portal now a priority that teams have gotten older, and the games have gotten better, but those who work in college sports see a downside with simply restocking rosters as opposed to developing young men and women as players and people.
“Dean Smith used to say the best thing about freshmen is they become sophomores,” Belmont University President Dr. Gregory L. Jones said. “Well, these days freshmen leave. I want to see that educational focus, that formation, the kind of building of teams which is also the kind of incubator for the type of leadership we need in companies and organizations.”
There is also a fear that the transfer portal allows student-athletes to run away from any adversity that they face. Get in an argument with your coach or don’t think you are getting enough playing time as a freshman? Now you can leave and start over some place else without having to sit out a year of competition instead of working through your issue and developing.
There’s no guarantee a player will land in a better spot – or even land at all – when they enter the transfer portal, either. In fact, for many it’s a black hole that could lead to the end of their playing career and perhaps even their opportunity to get an education.
Since the transfer portal began in 2021 about 35% of the players that have entered the portal never enrolled at a new school. Of the more than 3,200 football players that entered at the end of last season 1,143 remained uncommitted as football camps opened across the country last week.
“Most of life is overcoming certain situations that have been thrown your way our challenges that you can overcome with time and patience,” Corbin said. “And you’re not teaching (student-athletes) time and patience. You’re teaching a right now mentality to every decision that they make.”
