Former UCLA LB Mitchell Agude announces transfer destination

It’s been over a month since former UCLA linebacker Mitchell Agude announced he was entering the transfer portal. On Friday evening on his Instagram account, he officially announced he’ll be playing his college football next year with head coach Mario Cristobal and the Miami Hurricanes. Agude is currently rated as the No. 38 linebacker prospect in the 2022 On3 College Football Transfer Portal Rankings.

The talented linebacker made the decision after taking visits to all three of his finalists during the past month. On Thursday afternoon, Agude announced his three finalists on Twitter: the Miami Hurricanes, the Oregon Ducks, and the Washington Huskies.

He played in 18 games over his career with the Bruins, including 11 in 2021. UCLA will surely miss him as he was one of the team’s most disruptive pass rushers and earned second team All Pac-12 honors last year.

Agude arrived in Los Angeles as a three-star recruit from the class of 2017 according to the On3 Consensus, a complete and equally weighted industry-generated average that utilizes all four major recruiting media companies. Over his two years with UCLA, he totaled 78 tackles, 14.5 tackles for loss, and 4.5 sacks.

His biggest game of the year came against USC, when he had 10 tackles — including a tackle for loss — in the Bruins’ 62-33 win over the Trojans on Nov. 20.

Agude has an inspirational story about him, as Fox’s Tom Rinaldi chronicled his journey of surviving a coma at nine years old and getting back to the football field as a dominant force.

UCLA went 8-4 overall and 6-3 in Pac-12 action this season. The Bruins earned a Holiday Bowl appearance, but the game ended up getting canceled due to COVID-19 issues at NC State.

For updates on where all the different college football prospects across America are headed this offseason, keep it locked to the 2022 On3 Transfer Portal Wire.

Transfer portal information 

The NCAA Transfer Portal, which covers every NCAA sport at the Division I, II and III levels, is a private database with names of student-athletes who wish to transfer. It is not accessible to the public.

The process of entering the portal is done through a school’s compliance office. Once a player provides written notification of an intent to transfer, the office enters the player’s name in the database and everything is off and running. The compliance office has 48 hours to comply with the player’s request and that request cannot be refused.

Once a player’s name shows up in the portal, other schools can contact the player. Players can change their minds at any point and withdraw from the portal. However, once a player enters the portal, the current scholarship no longer has to be honored. In other words, if a player enters the portal but decides to stay, the school is not obligated to provide a scholarship anymore.

The database is a normal database, sortable by a variety of topics, including (of course) sport and name. A player’s individual entry includes basic details such as contact info, whether the player was on scholarship and whether the player is transferring as a graduate student.

A player can ask that a “do not contact” tag be placed on the report. In those instances, the players don’t want to be  contacted by schools unless they’ve initiated the communication.

The portal has been around since Oct. 15, 2018 and the new calendar cycle within the portal begins each August. For example, the 2021-22 cycle started Aug. 1. During the 2020-21 cycle, 2,626 FBS football players entered the transfer portal (including walk-ons). That comes after 1,681 entered during the 2019-20 cycle and 1,709 during the abbreviated 2018-19 cycle. In comparison, 1,833 Division I basketball players entered the portal during the 2020-21 cycle after totals of 1,020 in 2019-20 and 1,063 in 2018-19.

On3’s Nick Schultz also contributed to this article.