The calendar is the eternal enemy of college football. The sport calendar is and must be tied to the academic calendar as long as college football is going to remain college football. The fact they don’t line up all that well is a problem, and there is no perfect solution.
The relative transfer free-for-all of the last few years hasn’t been ideal, but it was constrained to a degree by having transfer portal periods. It could’ve been much worse without them.
This offseason cycle, the NCAA tried to tighten things up more by going to just one portal period in January. It certainly made early December less chaotic for new head coaching hires. They no longer had to walk in the door and both shore up and expand a high school recruiting class and put together a portal class within a couple of weeks.
It also has had the knock-on effect of reviving spring games. Last year, some schools scaled back or canceled their spring games. Or, they didn’t make them available for TV broadcast. In the former two cases, some coaches and administrators made some noises about the spring game concept being outdated. It was just the natural progression of things that they would go away around now. Turns out it was just paranoid coaches not wanting to put on a scouting show for their rosters to get picked over in the spring portal period, same as the schools that held a game but didn’t televise them.
I’ve always liked spring games, since they’re purely about fun without the stress of winning and losing. Also now as a parent of young kids, I appreciate them as the perfect opportunity to bring little ones to a football event without needing to worry about the intense atmosphere or potential late kickoff time of a fall game. They’re a great introductory event for creating the next generation of fans, so I thought it was short sighted for programs to cancel their games last year.
But while the lack of a spring portal period has had multiple salutary effects, it doesn’t actually mean that no players will be changing schools in a few months.
After all, college football is college football. You know what any college student can attempt to do at the end of the spring semester? Withdraw from one university in order to enroll in another.
Just last year, cornerback Xavier Lucas transferred from Wisconsin to Miami without using the transfer portal. Lucas’s side said he simply wanted to transfer back close to home due to his father’s illness; Wisconsin refused to put his name in the portal over their belief that tampering had occurred. UW is suing UM over the affair on the grounds that someone from south Florida impermissibly contacted and enticed Lucas after he’d signed a revenue sharing agreement up north.
Tampering is the core issue here with portal periods. The transfer portal exists as a sanctioned loophole to the rule that prohibits contact between a player at one school and coaches at another school. Once a player goes in the portal, it’s no longer tampering for someone else to recruit him.
However, it’s also not tampering for a coach to recruit a player who is not enrolled in school. If someone withdraws from classes, he no longer is a student at his old university. It wouldn’t break a rule for coaches anywhere to contact him once he’s officially out.
Somewhere along the line this kind of transfer was dubbed a “blind transfer”, and it’s on the NCAA’s radar thanks to the Lucas saga from last year. The NCAA Oversight Committee is considering some options including some pretty major fines for schools who take in blind transfers.
I’m not sure that’s the way to go if we’re going to be trying to prevent this. Language in the revenue sharing contracts that specifies damages if a player leaves before a certain date (like the opening of the next portal period, say) seems like a better option to me.
It has long been a thing that a player discovers in spring practice that he’s not as high on the depth chart as he’d thought. Then after spring, he has a meeting with the coaches where he’s told that if he wants major snaps, he’s going to have to find them elsewhere. And then after the meeting, he transfers to a non-power conference school or down a level or two.
I would imagine any penalties would exempt going down levels. The worry here is not about FCS or D-II teams poaching the third and fourth stringers from FBS schools. That said, if a guy isn’t going to play at Michigan, why should he be prevented from seeing if he can hack it at Eastern Michigan?
If the mechanism for preventing the poaching of star players and solid rotation guys is in the rev share deal, that provides a way for player and school to mutually agree to void the contract. That way, a P4 benchwarmer can find a G6 landing spot right away and not have to go all the way down to another level.
If the Committee on Oversight can agree on something by April, then we can find out whether we’ll have to watch out for blind transfers or not. If, however, they do the traditional NCAA thing and hem and haw about it and miss the deadline, then watch out for some number of players following in Lucas’s footsteps and changing schools without using the portal.
I would also expect that before too long, if the NCAA gets a blind transfer penalty passed, that it’ll be challenged by a lawsuit. Given how other player movement restriction suits have gone, I wouldn’t bet on the NCAA winning. That’s another reason why damages in rev share contracts are probably a better place to try to prevent this kind of transfer.
I’m glad that the change to a single transfer portal window seems to have worked well. There is still this blind transfer loophole to deal with, and for at least one more year, it could get messy. Rosters may yet not be as locked down tight as you might think.