James Franklin compares transfer portal to former junior college approach

The transfer portal has now become a primary roster-building tool for most teams ever since the rules were relaxed on first-time transfers a couple years ago. However, at Penn State, head coach James Franklin wants to avoid falling too much in love with the portal. He likes having the option to go and grab a player if he needs, but doesn’t need to stuff his roster full of transfers year in and year out.

In a recent interview with Adam Breneman, Franklin compared his use of the transfer portal to the way he used to go about recruiting junior college players. He never recruited a ton of them, but says they were a nice backup plan in case Franklin needed another player in a pinch.

“Yeah, I look at it, you know, a little bit like people used to back in the old days with junior colleges,” shared Franklin. “Where, you’d go to the junior college to solve an immediate problem but you didn’t want to build your program that way. We kind of approached the transfer portal the same way.”

In an ideal world, no Nittany Lion player would ever transfer out, but that’s just not reality, and Franklin is now often left to replace departed transfers. So, that leads to him hitting the portal himself, but never to fill out most of his roster.

“We hope our culture is so good that guys will stay and still grow and evolve and mature within the program and feel like they can achieve all of their dreams here — and have a maturity with them and have our relationship with them that you can be honest, you know, with them. So that’s the first part.

“The second part is… we’re going to go in the transfer portal like the junior colleges to solve problems where we have immediate needs. And for us, a lot of times, it has been with young men that we recruited on the front end, so there’s already an established relationship, which I think also helps reduce risk. We know what we’re bringing into the program.

“Now, I say that. If we have a year where our transfer portal numbers spike and they spike late then we’re probably going to have to go into the transfer portal, because that’s the only option at that point to solve those problems.”

So, James Franklin is willing to utilize the transfer portal, especially if a number of guys leave PSU in one particular year. But he just doesn’t want that to become a primary way of building up his team on a yearly basis.