College football trends, takeaways from the NCAA transfer portal

One of the growing trends of college football has been the emergence of players entering the NCAA transfer portal. We take a look at the trend.

It’s been seven months since the transfer portal opened and to say it’s been popular with the players would be a massive understatement.

Now, if you only listened to the news you might think it’s mainly quarterbacks who have been packing their bags, but nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the most common positions in this year’s portal aren’t even on the offensive side of the ball and quarterbacks are only the fourth-most common position behind defensive backs, linebackers and defensive linemen.

*Data from 247Sports

As it currently stands, one of the most common reasons for a player to enter the transfer portal is because they either want to be named the starter or get more playing time. This is especially true for players that came out of high school with a high rating — since highly rated prospects almost always have high expectations for themselves.

In short, players with high, unfulfilled expectations have the highest likelihood of entering the transfer portal.

Understandably,  there’s isn’t anyone in the world of college football with higher expectations than the Gatorade National Player of the Year.

If the high expectations theory holds true then these players would be at the highest risk of transferring and sure enough, they are. Between 2008-18 the Gatorade National Player of the Year award winner ended up transferring 45.5 percent of the time.

2008: Garrett Gilbert — Texas to SMU
2012: Max Browne — USC to Pitt
2014: Kyler Murray — Texas Tech to Oklahoma
2015: Jacob Eason — Georgia to Washington
2016: Tate Martell — Ohio State to Miami

The percentage only slightly drops to 36.8 percent when the time period is expanded to 2000 to present day.

Considering the dramatic increase in transfers since the permission to contact rule change, are we to assume that even more G.P.O.Y. winners would have transferred had the rules been as relaxed over the last two decades as they are now?

It’s hard to imagine, but numbers don’t lie and it’s a fair assumption to make that more than half of the No. 1 ranked prospects in each recruiting class would end up changing teams at some point during their college career.

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The connection between high ratings, high expectations and an increased chance of transferring creates a difficult situation to come to terms with for coaches looking to sign the best available players that can fit into a three to four-year plan.

College football is becoming increasingly more competitive with every season that goes by. Bigger, faster phenoms continue to emerge across the talent-rich southeast as well as Texas and California. As this trend progresses it’s only logical to assume that expectations will continue to be raised and just as previously stated, these high expectations ultimately lead to a rational state of anxiety about whether or not your on the right team and going to reach your full potential before that final whistle blows signaling the end of your college career.

So much of being a great recruiter is about taking the time to listen to individual players about their needs, explaining why they’re uniquely compatible with the program’s culture and then conveying a genuine sense of expertise on how you’re going to help him reach their full potential.

Unfortunately, telling recruits what they want to hear whether it’s true not seems to be more common that schools would be willing to admit.  That is to say, on some level a significant percentage of transfers must feel like their coaches weren’t following through on what had been discussed during their recruitment.

For the first time in college football history, there’s seems to be a swift, unforgiving response to these broken promises and what better way to get even than to become the star player for another team. If any good is to come out of this, it will hopefully reshape how programs and players interact and communicate with each other.

After all, no one enjoys transferring, its a disruptive and stressful process, but until programs start being more honest with the players they recruit and recruits somehow learn to be less anxious and not let the high expectations weigh too heavily on them — we can all expect to see long lines at the transfer portal for the foreseeable future.