The transfer portal is a tad out of control. The data keeps changing but more than 800 FBS football players have entered the portal since Aug. 1 with a little over 25-percent of them finding a new home so far. My best guess is that, by the end of this offseason cycle in August 2022, the portal will have seen more than 2,000 FBS players enter and less than half of them will find new FBS homes. That means a whole lot of players are getting very poor advice.
What can be done? Here's an idea. The NFL has an NFL Draft Advisory Board that will give potential draft prospects an idea of where they would likely land in the NFL Draft. This allows players to make an educated decision about their future. While this isn’t a foolproof system, it’s certainly welcome advice. College football needs something similar for the transfer portal.
The NCAA needs a small team of evaluators who can help assess the chances of a player landing another FBS scholarship before they enter the portal. The same holds true on the FCS level as well. If a player wants an assessment of his potential landing spot — FBS, FCS or lower — he can submit a request to this NCAA panel. And it should be an anonymous process.
Right now players can simply take the advice of family, friends or some morons on social media and jump into the portal. At that point, the university is no longer on the hook for that player's scholarship and the player could potentially find themselves in a situation where they don't have a landing spot. If there was a portal equivalent of the NFL Draft Advisory Board, an assessment would at least give the player the ability to make a more informed decision.
It’s not easy to assess some players who haven’t seen a lot of playing time or are coming off of injury, but it can still be done. I assess a player's potential landing spot based on the Power Five, Group of Five, FCS and lower talent pool constantly and it’s not my full-time job. A group of two or three scouts could really curtail the number of poor decisions being made on a weekly basis. Is this feasible? Will it happen? Likely not, but some sort of checks and balances are needed at a somewhat neutral level as more and more players decide to transfer.
