The NCAA Transfer Portal is Changing the Way College Football Coaches Recruit High School Prospects

Image; Sarah Miller, Hoosier Huddle

Written by Sammy Jacobs (@Hoosier_Huddle)

The NCAA Transfer Portal has been the topic of a lot of discussion since its establishment on October 15, 2018. Despite not being as space-age as it sounds, the NCAA Transfer Portal has become an extreme popular item for the media fans, coaches and players in college football to follow. While the main benefit of the NCAA Transfer Portal has been to give student athletes more freedom and rights to pursue playing time or other academic endeavors, there may be a down side to it as well.

David Schuman, CEO of NUC Sports which is a company that helps high school football players make the most of their opportunities, wrote a short article on his views of the transfer portal on NUCSports.com. His views are pretty simple. The transfer portal is hurting high school recruiting.

In an interview with Hoosier Huddle Schuman, also the head football coach at Red Bank High School in New Jersey, said that the transfer portal is limiting opportunities for high school recruits. If each FBS team held five scholarships for transfers it would amount to “650 spots at FBS taken away from high school right off the bat.” That is a big number when the years start to add up. Schuman also said it “means less development, more pressure to win now and less likely to take a player who could become great but never gets the chance because they need time.”

With the “win now” mentality that is attached to man of the multi-million dollar contracts for college coaches, no one can blame them for taking advantage of the system. “You will have the schools that focus on high school and others that focus on the portal,” Schuman told Hoosier Huddle, “it’s just like you had basketball programs that focused on 1 and done players and others that focused on 4 year players. Both had success. Just depends on how patient you college is willing to be.”

Schuman, who deals with plenty of parents and prospects, said that it is “hard to communicate this because it’s a major issue that they and their parents will not understand. All you can tell them is find a place that will want you to play for them. They will have to find the school that is willing to develop players.”

Indiana football head coach Tom Allen has seen both sides of the transfer portal in the 2020 recruiting cycle as four Hoosiers (Cole Gest, Coy Cronk, Peyton Ramsey and Ronnie Walker) have chosen to test the transfer waters, but Allen has also picked up a transfer in Dylan Powell from Stanford.

Allen was asked at his National Signing Day press conference how the portal has impacted IU and how are college coaches adjusting to the rules.

“It's definitely changing the way you view recruiting,” Allen said, “I know just having conversations with high school coaches kind of over the last few weeks when you go out and they get in schools. I know they see how it's affecting the way colleges are recruiting, where you're still going to have the majority of your class is going to be high school guys. But now you have a group that you kind of, some are setting aside for those transfer guys, which is something you never discussed in the past.”

Both Schuman and Allen agree that how coaches use the portal will depend upon the philosophy of the coaching staff and school.

Allen said he is “a big believer in developing, getting guys out of high school and developing those guys. But, when due to injuries or when you have guys on your own team that choose to go elsewhere, and it's obviously very, very common -- across the country now, everybody seems to be in the same boat with this. But bottom line is you have to have a plan when that happens. Sometimes you don't know. Sometimes you have a heads-up, sometimes you don't. So you just have to sometimes adjust on the fly when that situation occurs.”

Is there a solution to the potential shirking of opportunities for high school prospects? Schuman had a proposal that makes sense, but would take a lot of discussion. He said that if they could cap the scholarships of high school prospects at 85, which is what FBS teams currently get, and add five additional scholarships for transfers. This issue has not been quantified much and only time will tell if it really is a big issue, but just over a year into it, there are concerns about the effect the transfer portal has on high school recruiting.