During the 2025 college football playoff 7 of the 12 teams had starting quarterbacks who were from the transfer portal. Then the final four teams (Indiana, Oregon, Ole Miss, and Miami) all had transfer portal quarterbacks. Teams must ask themselves this: Do we want to use the transfer portal to find a quarterback or recruit a quarterback out of high school? More frequently, teams have decided to go the transfer portal route.
Look no further than Miami and Indiana, the two teams that played in the National Championship game. The winning team, Indiana, had the Heisman Trophy winner Fernando Mendoza, who transferred to Indiana after playing at California. The year before, they had signed Kurtis Rourke from Ohio, and he had led them to the College Football Playoff. Indiana will continue this trend next season when they pick up TCU’s former starting quarterback, Josh Hoover, who will take over from Mendoza.
Miami has taken a similar route to Indiana. In the 2024 season, they got Cam Ward out of the transfer portal from Washington. Â Then they followed it up with signing Carson Beck this past season from Georgia. Next season, they went and got Duke quarterback Darian Mensah out of the transfer portal as the next starting quarterback.
So, what top teams are recruiting quarterbacks out of high school and developing them? Not as many as you expect. Georgia seems content to continue to go the high school route. They signed Gunner Stockton out of high school, and he is returning next year as their starting quarterback. Notre Dame is another team that went with a high school prospect this season, with CJ Carr. That was after they went back-to-back years using the transfer portal in Sam Hartman and Riley Leonard.
The other thing teams have done is a hybrid model where they use the transfer portal, but also develop quarterbacks. Ohio State and Oregon fit this model. Ohio State signed Will Howard out of Kansas State, and he helped them win a National Title in 2024. Then they started another transfer portal quarterback in Julian Sayin this season, but the caveat with that was he transferred after spending a month at Alabama, after Nick Saban retired, he bolted to Ohio State.
Then Sayin sat out the 2024 season and redshirted. Taking over this year for Howard and playing extremely well. Ohio State looks like they will stick with the high school route because former top quarterback prospect Tavien St. Clair will back up Sayin this season. He is expected to eventually start at Ohio State.
Oregon is similar. They went and got Dillan Gabriel as a starter during the 2024 season, then this year they started Dante Moore, who transferred from UCLA, but sat out the 2024 season to redshirt. Moore decided to forgo the NFL and is returning next season as the starting quarterback. Oregon decided they wanted to go to the transfer portal again, and they signed Dylan Raiola, Nebraska’s starting quarterback from this past season. Raiola is expected to sit out this year’s redshirt and take over for Moore the following season.
More frequently, teams are using the transfer portal to get their starting quarterbacks. At this point, it seems like the best bet for quarterbacks is to go to a lower-level team, develop, then use the transfer portal to transfer to a top team. The bottom line is that most of the top teams in the country are just looking for their next starting quarterback from the transfer portal.