Predicting the future: Transfer Portal

We devote much of our space in the Blue & Gold News to looking back, but this seems like a perfect time to look forward … not to next year but to the next decade.

If you listen to oldies radio, you may be familiar with the Zager and Evans song from the late ‘60s titled, “In the year 2525.”

Its lyrics include, “In the year 2525, if man is still alive; If woman can survive, they may find …”

I’m not about to try to predict the year 2525 for athletics or anything else. But I do think a look to the year 2035 is appropriate. It may seem like an eternity away, but we’re now closer to 2035 than we are away from WVU’s basketball run to the Final Four in 2010 and pretty close to equal distance from the Mountaineers’ 2012 Orange Bowl slaughter of Clemson.

For many of us, those iconic West Virginia athletic moments feel like they happened two months ago, but time flies, and so we will soon be well into the ‘30s … if we all survive.

I’m not Nostradamus, so I certainly won’t guarantee any of my predictions for the future are 100% accurate, but here are my thoughts on what college and WVU athletics will look like in 2035.

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Transfer Portal – Like NIL, the ability for a one-time transfer from one Division I school to another with immediate eligibility is something that almost certainly will not go away.

Like NIL, the ability to transfer with immediate eligibility without the need for an NCAA waiver began in 2021. While NIL and the transfer portal are theoretically separate, in many ways they are tied together, and not just because of the timing of their birth.

Many – though certainly not all – transfers are being lured to a new school by the promises of NIL money. Such promises ahead of the student-athlete’s actual enrollment at a different college are supposed to be illegal, but very rarely is that standard enforced. Thus student-athletes are being pouched right and left, and while basically every coach complains about it, almost all of them are seemingly doing it.

Putting some teeth into the regulations of stopping such pouching would be huge, but let’s face it, cheating has been going on in intercollegiate athletics since the beginning of intercollegiate athletics in the 19th century, and nothing is going to completely stop that. Slowing it down is the best-hoped outcome.

The NCAA is trying to add some rules to slow down the transfer rate, which grew from 10% of all FBS scholarship players in 2020 to 16% in 2022. In basketball, 20% of all Division I men’s players have entered the portal so far in 2023.

Last fall, the NCAA created transfer windows as to when an undergraduate can enter the portal. Division I football and other fall sports have two portal entry windows. This year for FBS football, it was from Dec. 5 through Jan. 18 with a spring window from April 15-30. For men’s basketball, the portal window is open from March 13 to May 11. The spring sports have two windows; for baseball that is Dec. 1-15 and from May 30 to July 13. Graduate students and those whose coaches are fired don’t have such windows, though as WVU basketball’s Jose Perez found out, entering the portal is one thing, but being granted immediate eligibility at a new school can be another.

The NCAA has also added regulations to limit the ability of a student-athlete to transfer more than once, as a number of players, including several Mountaineers, are on their third or fourth school. The key word there is “limit,” because we’ll see how free the NCAA is with waivers for an undergrad seeking multiple transfers.

These new rules – from tightening NIL misuse to the portal windows and limiting multiple transfers – will probably slow the transfer rate some, but the way to decrease the movement the most is by making student-athletes employees of an athletic department with a contract binding the two entities. Most contracts can be broken, as we see all the time with coaching contracts, but there are often penalties, financial or otherwise, that come with trying to move from one contract to another. These contracts can’t be all one-sided, written only as a way of limiting individual freedom. Such contracts must also hamper the ability of programs to rid themselves of student-athletes, which is a common practice now, simply because they may not be as talented as a coaching staff hoped.

By 2035, the transfer rate may have slowed a bit because of the rules recently put into place – and others likely to follow – but the only way to have a major impact on player movement is through contracts.