You hear about it every college football offseason. What teams are going to improve their rosters through the transfer portal, and how many players will they take?
Initially created in 2018, the transfer portal was designed to streamline the process for college athletes to transfer to a new school more easily. In the years since the new era of name, image, and likeness was ushered in, the transfer portal has become the Wild West.
In the first year of the portal, 1,561 players entered it. As of Jan. 12, a staggering 6,200 players have entered the portal for the 2026 offseason window. That means over a fourth of all Division I football players will be at a new school next season.
What was once intended to be a means for players to earn more playing time or find a better fit to improve their draft stock has since evolved into free agency. Unlike professional sports, there are almost no regulations, meaning players essentially become free agents every season.
The lack of regulations has led some schools to incorporate stipulations in player contracts, which have led to even more complications in recent years. Just look at the recent debacle the University of Washington faced with their quarterback, who had just resigned for $4 million.
Demond Williams Jr. recently announced his intention to enter the transfer portal, just days after resigning with Washington. There was just one problem. His contract included a stipulation that Williams would not enter his name into the portal, which set the grounds for a legal battle.
Rather than fight a battle he was almost certainly going to lose, Williams made another announcement days later that he would, in fact, not be transferring and would return to Washington next season. No hard feelings, right?
It is not just these types of debacles that have created chaos for the transfer portal; it is also the number of teams that have prioritized buying a roster of junior and senior athletes over developing their own talent in exchange for competing for a national championship.
Indiana University and the University of Miami will face off on Monday night in the College Football National Championship game. Both teams heavily rely on transfers to make up most of their starters.
Miami transfers account for 53.7% of its starting players, with the majority of them coming from other Power Four schools. Indiana’s starters are even more transfer-heavy, with 64.9% of starters being added through the transfer portal. Many of these players, though, followed head coach Curt Cignetti when he left James Madison University to coach at Indiana.
That is not even the most recent mass exodus that James Madison has faced. After the school made the College Football Playoff this season, it will see zero players from its starting offense returning next season, with seven starters jumping into the portal following the loss to the University of Oregon in the opening round.
These trends are not healthy for college football. What benefit does a Group of Five like JMU have in making the playoff if it means that all its starters will be offered more money to transfer elsewhere?
To put it bluntly, the transfer portal has gone entirely off the rails. Long gone are the days when players sat behind a starter to develop and gain experience, a lack of which will almost certainly hurt the product of the NFL in the coming years.
Unfortunately, the fix for this does not appear to be anywhere in sight, as any attempts the NCAA could make would ultimately wind up back in court, where the NCAA has not had a good track record recently.
As for what the fix could be, a possible solution could be to limit the number of times a player can transfer or cap the number of transfers a school can make in a single transfer cycle. Until such fixes or regulations are implemented, however, the transfer portal will remain the Wild West of college sports.
Nathan Inman is a junior sports communication major from Spartanburg, South Carolina. Nathan can be reached at [email protected].
