Football Friday: What Do College Coaches Think of the Transfer Portal?
Coaches at Chicagoland exposure camp speak out about the portal and the challenges of roster construction in 2022
Speaking in front of hundreds of campers on a cool June Sunday afternoon in suburban Chicago, Indiana State Head Football Coach Curt Mallory stood before the kneeling group and delivered a timeless message.
“At the end of the day, how you will be remembered will not be how good of a player you are, but what kind of teammate you were,” Mallory said. “We’re all building teams here, guys. We’re looking for guys that are not only good players but way better teammates.”
In college football in the year 2022, being a good teammate in college football takes on an entirely new meaning and importance.
First instituted in 2018, the transfer portal has transformed the sport. It allows any NCAA player to transfer from one school to the next without any penalty. The only restriction – if a player enters the portal after May 1, they are not eligible to play for a new school that fall season. Otherwise, athletes are free to be as transitory as they desire.
Most of the attention with the portal has been focused on schools at the highest level – programs at Power 5 conferences such as the Big Ten, Southeastern Conference and Big 12.
But what about the hundreds of other schools at lower level divisions like FCS, Division 2 or Division 3? They all need players to fill elastic rosters.
That’s why coaches from predominately Midwestern schools such as Indiana State, Upper Iowa, Augustana and Valparaiso were all scouting for talent Sunday at a one day prospect camp hosted by Lake Forest College.
“It’s all (FCS) and down. We don’t have any (Division) 1-A schools (at the camp),” camp organizer and Lake Forest College Head Football Coach James Catanzaro said. “It’s a five-to-one coach-to-player ratio at the camp. The kids have a chance to shake hands with the coaches, to introduce themselves. It’s built for the small schools that recruit Chicago to get the intimate recruiting experience with the athletes.”
For three hours, campers (all high school-aged athletes from across Illinois, Wisconsin and neighboring states) are put through football-style drills while being evaluated by coaches in search of their next quarterback, linebacker or long snapper.
The months of May and June are prime player evaluation for college coaches as there are minimal restrictions on communication with high school prospects.
“I’ve been to six camps so far. Our staff has gone to 20 this (camp) season,” Jason Hoskins said, head coach at Division 2 Upper Iowa located in Fayette, Iowa.
“We get around this month and May,” D’Andre Weaver said, the quarterbacks coach at Lawrence University, a Division 3 school in Appleton, Wisconsin. “We’ve been to 10 or 15 camps. Just trying to find those athletes that have our buy in and fit our core values.”
More and more, finding those athletes means dipping into the transfer portal.
According to NCAA, more than 8,000 college football players at all levels were in the portal at the end of the 2021 season. With 600 colleges offering football, that adds up to a bullish buyer’s market.
“There are schools living in the portal. It’s like shopping at the grocery store,” Catanzaro said. “I need a quarterback, I’m going to find a quarterback. I need a lineman, I’ll find a lineman.”
Mallory, entering his sixth season at FCS (1-AA) Indiana State, was player shopping from field to field Sunday, eyeing campers at multiple positions of need.
Consider this – the Sycamores lost two long snappers to graduation with eligibility remaining. A kicker was diagnosed with a sports hernia. One of the team’s quarterback’s decided to not use an extra year granted by the NCAA and accept a job offer out of football.
“Now we are looking for a quarterback. You try and manage your roster and these are things that come up,” Mallory said. “With the portal, there are good things and some things not so good. For us, it’s been beneficial.”
On the turf field where the host Foresters play their games, Hoskins watches long snappers work through a series of drills. His team finished 1-10 in 2021 and has several roster needs, one which includes long snapper.
Hoskins said using the portal is as much about managing expectations and resources as filling an immediate positional need.
“It’s probably not realistic for us to find a kid from UCLA,” Hoskins said.
Division 2 schools like Upper Iowa, a small, private college with an enrollment under 4,000, can find transfers from Division 1 programs but have most success with players leaving Midwest-based FCS (1-AA) programs and those that transfer from other Division 2 schools.
With only five full time assistant coaches, delegating time to review the 24/7 pace of the portal is not realistic.
“It’s hard for us to have the staff to do all of that,” Hoskins said. “We still do it the right way where the majority of our (recruits) will be high school kids we will bring up through our program for four or five years and supplement with any transfer kids that we need.”
According to CBS Sports, the number of high school recruits signed by colleges saw a 20% reduction in the last recruiting cycle. The number of Division 1 transfers doubled since the one-time transfer rule went into effect last August.
Those are not positive trends for high school athletes looking to continue to play football at the next level.
A universal solution applicable to not just football but all walks of life: for young people to reduce expectations with a dose of grounded realism about just how good they are and at what level he (or she) can actually play.
“There seems to be bigger push where it’s ‘D1, D1, D1’ rather than find the right fit. If the right fit is D1 then awesome. If not. then find a place you can go, contribute and be a guy,” Hoskins said. “In the whole social media, Twitter world, it’s a little bit more fun to tweet out the D1 offer than the right fit for you.”
That right fit – a combination of academics, athletics, social and cultural – can result in receiving what can amount to a free education. With so many private schools costing over $50k a year when cost of attendance fees are totaled, football can be a road to significantly reducing those costs, if not all of them.
But in order to achieve that outcome, young athletes have to love the game and be rational about their talent level.
“If you’re a good student, have a good background and qualify for aid, it all stacks on top of each other. There are avenues to get your school paid for,” one coach said from a Division 3 Illinois college said who preferred to remain anonymous. “But the question you need to ask is, ‘do you want to play football or do you want to go D1?’ Because if you’re not going to talk to me and no one at D1 is talking to you then you don’t want to play football, you want to go D1. You have to find people who love football and just want to play.”
Amongst the 400-plus football players at Lake Forest College Sunday, the coaches in attendance believe they can find a few that fit their criteria for success.
But they better make productive use of their time and work fast. There are rosters that need to filled out before official practices begin for the 2022 season.
“We have 10 (players) that left Upper Iowa that don’t have homes,” Hoskins said. “We have 10 in the portal that don’t have places to go.”
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