SMQ: Would free transfers cause the rich to get richer in college football?

Recent calls to allow free transfers on a one-time basis have been met with fear-mongering about the rich getting richer in college football.

College is an interesting period in anyone’s life. Teenagers are asked to make significantly impactful decisions about the course of their futures. Given the nature of teenage decision making, not every teenager makes a decision at that point in life that works for them a year or two down the road.

The NCAA recently introduced the possibility of allowing all college athletes in all sports to transfer once, penalty-free, during their limited period of eligibility to compete. This would come in lieu of the graduate transfer rule. In the process, this removes the opportunity for students who have completed undergraduate degrees to transfer to a new institution to continue graduate studies while remaining immediately eligible to compete in NCAA-sanctioned events.

Perhaps the biggest critique of the new proposal, though, has nothing to do with the abridgment of graduate transfer policy. Rather, many have come out decrying that this will create a situation of upward mobility in college football. The fear is that the rich will get richer, poaching talent developed at smaller schools and turning players into mercenaries.

Others have countered that this is already the case, especially in college football but also in men’s college basketball. I can’t speak to the hardcourt, but one question immediately popped to mind when I first viewed the backlash to this proposal:

Is this actually the case about transfers?

Points throughout the history of intercollegiate sport have been argued as the death knell of the institution, and yet here we are with athletic competitions as ingrained as ever into higher education.

That question looms large over how and to what extent the NCAA might finally update its transfer policies. In this edition of Sunday Morning Quarterback, let’s look at some data that might shed more light on whether an era of poaching talent by blueblood programs is really “what the new normal will look like in college football” — or whether this is merely a scare tactic to maintain status-quo levels of control over player movement.

The scope of the study into the impacts of the transfer portal

Plenty of players in the past few years have been immediately eligible to play. The NCAA Transfer Portal, instituted in 2019, gives us a clear opportunity to look at these transfers over the past few years.

Taking the transfer portal data available at 247sports.com, I isolated out only those players who were immediately eligible to play for their new team in 2019 and 2020. With that information, I compiled the following dataset to offer a starting point for analysis.

Within this dataset are a few key points. The most critical are looking at origin school and the player’s new school, which allows for coding the direction of mobility in the final column. Given the effective divide within the FBS, I coded these movements around Power Five (including Notre Dame), Group of Five (including all other independent programs), and FCS distinctions. In this fashion we can more clearly assess movements between top schools and smaller programs.

Also embedded within the dataset are each player’s position and the number of stars the player had as a high-school recruit. Included in this study were players who received between two and five stars coming out of high school. This omitted a few players from each year’s sample size, but given the big question is about the rich getting richer it seemed wise to cull those players on the margins of movement.

From this data, we can start to answer the key question this week.

Are the rich getting richer in college football?

This question really breaks down into three distinct questions:

1. Have immediately-eligible players from the past two offseasons been more likely to move up from an FCS or Group of Five program to a Power Five school?
2. Has there been a significant upward redistribution of players based on how they were ranked coming out of high school?
3. Do certain positions transfer upward more frequently than others?

Let’s look at each of these three questions in turn to help answer the overarching query at the heart of this week’s column.

1. Is there more upward movement in general?

To assess the question of upward mobility in college football transfers, we will look at the subdivision codings to see where players transfer from and where they end up at a new school. These movements break into three categories:

• RISE: A player is considered to rise when he moves from a Group of Five school to a Power Five program, or when he moves from an FCS school to any FBS institution in either the Group of Five or Power Five.
• NULL: A player is considered to have null movement when he moves between Power Five programs, between Group of Five schools, or between FCS institutions.
• FALL: A player is considered to fall when he moves from a Power Five school to a Group of Five program or an FCS institution, or when he moves from the Group of Five to an FCS school.

If this is already the status quo in college football, we should expect to see far more examples of rise than we do of players falling or remaining null.

Based solely on the movements of immediately-eligible players over the past two years, it appears that universally immediate eligibility for all player transfers on a one-time basis would have the opposite effect of that which is most feared. Rather than upward mobility, we see that there has been greater downward mobility around transfers in 2019 and 2020.

The rich, in this understanding, glut themselves on the best available talent at the initial time of high-school recruiting. That talent then filters down the ranks when starters are separated from benchwarmers over the first few years at a powerhouse program, and those highly-rated benchwarmers seek out opportunities to start at a different school.

That, in turn, forces us to examine the second question…

2. Is there greater upward mobility depending on recruiting rankings?

Coming out of high school, it is rare that a five-star recruit (or even a four-star recruit) ends up anywhere other than on a Power Five roster. Given the nature of scouting and recruiting in the 21st century, the highly-touted gems of the high school ranks get almost exclusively scooped up by the richest programs.

When players transfer, does that talent trickle downward? We see a general trend of players dropping within the FBS or between Division I subdivisions. Do those numbers correlate to what we are seeing among transfers based on their high school recruiting rankings?

In this case, we can see that initial recruiting rankings do matter in terms of how we view transfer distribution patterns. Far from the rich getting richer, they are either maintaining or losing their top talent.

When it comes to five-star recruits, transfers in general are rare. Only four have been available over the past two seasons, and all four moved from one Power Five school to another Power Five program. That is hardly an example of the rich getting richer; rather, this is merely redistribution among the rich.

Four-star recruits also reveal the majority also move between Power Five schools, mirroring the five-star trend. This is far less of a universal, though, as one-third of players move from Power Five rosters to join Group of Five teams and another 10 percent move from the Power Five to the FCS.

Once we get down to the bulk of players that fall into the three-star range, a different and more fluid pattern emerges. More than 60 percent of the time, a three-star player leaving a Power Five school transitions downward to either a Group of Five or FCS program. At the same time, three-star players invariably move up from the FCS to an FBS program. Similarly, transfers move to a Power Five opportunity in half of the cases of players leaving Group of Five schools.

Given that the majority of transfers originate at the Power Five level — accounting for nearly three-quarters of all transfers among two-star or higher players within Division I football — it is inevitable that there is nowhere to go but to an equivalent program or downward in stature.

3. Are there deeper disparities between positions on the gridiron?

As the data shows, there are disparities inevitable in the way players transfer. The rich, by and large, experience a net drain of talent (outside of four- and five-star players) relative to those who move upward to the Power Five from a Group of Five or FCS school.

Is there, however, a difference in movement based on a player’s position?

Just as with recruiting rankings, certain positions are more highly valued when it comes time to evaluate potential transfers.

If evaluating solely on rise and fall, we see that players at positions like quarterback and offensive line either remain in the Power Five or move up to the Power Five from a lower tier of competition. That is less true for players on the defensive side of the ball, especially in the secondary where movements more frequently function as a downward redistribution of talent.

We also see a similar trend at running back, where players are far more likely to transition downward than upward. Only one running back, James Gilbert, moved from a Group of Five school to a Power Five program when he transferred from Ball State to Kansas State ahead of the 2019 season. Four others came out with null movement, leaving 26 of the 31 running backs to distribute to lower-tier programs from where they started.

As such, we definitely see disparities in how transfers move based on the position they occupy on a roster. Much like in the pro ranks, certain positions are valued as more critical and others as more fungible when it comes to talent acquisition and improvement.

Returning to the original question about the rich getting richer

Ultimately, most of the player distributions viewed within the past two cycles of the transfer portal — at least as they relate to transfers with immediate eligibility — show not an upward distribution of talent but a downward redistribution. The rich are not, contrary to popular belief, getting richer.

Talent at the top of the recruiting rankings remains by and large with Power Five teams, as these programs shuffle their decks more than they call up from below. Because highly-touted recruits end up by a significant margin at Power Five programs out of high school, none of that mobility can be considered upward in nature.

When it comes to recruits who entered college with two, three, or even four stars, though, distribution starts to trend more downward than upward. Transfers are either remaining at the level of the sport where they started in college, or they are moving downward.

That, of course, is not true of every position. If you are good enough to draw interest at positions like quarterback and along the offensive line, the final destination for transfers will more often than not be a Power Five program. If you are a running back or in the defensive backfield, you are more likely to end up moving out of the Power Five to a smaller school.

Ultimately, though, even a system of free and unlimited transfers is unlikely to result in a significant increase in player movement — and whatever movement does occur would likely result in downward mobility rather than upward redistribution.

Over the past two seasons, only 320 starred players out of the 22,100 total number of individuals on football scholarships at the FBS level transferred with immediate eligibility. Of those 320, only three transferred in back-to-back seasons.

Quarterback Nick Starkel moved from Texas A&M to Arkansas to San Jose State, a null shift from Power Five to Power Five school followed by a downward transfer to the Group of Five. Safety Qwuantrezz Knight moved from Maryland to Kent State to UCLA, transitioning downward and then back up to his original station coming out of high school. Wide receiver DeAndre McNeal went from Florida Atlantic to SMU and back to Florida Atlantic between 2019 and 2020.

Perhaps more liberal transfer rules would result in a flood of players moving between schools. The data, though, shows that the bulk of the transfers would be moving between Power Five programs or moving downward to seek more playing time at a smaller school. Far from signaling the death of Group of Five programs or FCS schools, this redistribution would almost certainly serve to enrich the level of play at those tiers of the Division I game.