Stanford wrestling national champion Shane Griffith enters NCAA transfer portal

Stanford wrestling national champion Shane Griffith entered the NCAA transfer portal as a grad transfer, according to Pat Mineo of The Wrestling Room.

Griffith, the 2021 national champion at 165 pounds, has one year of eligibility left due to the COVID-19 waiver. He’ll utilize it as a graduate year.

He’ll be one of the most sought after wrestlers in the transfer portal this offseason.

Griffith is 87-11 in four varsity seasons for Stanford. He went 28-0 in 2020 before the NCAA Tournament was canceled at the start of the pandemic.

While he went 12-1 in 2021, Griffith wrestled as the No. 8 seed in the NCAA Tournament and won his first national title. In the process, he saved the Stanford wrestling program, along with other athletic teams, from being cut from the school.

Griffith wrestled in an all black singlet, refusing to display the Stanford logo unless the program stayed put. Eventually, the university did not cut the many programs as initially intended.

In 2022, Griffith returned to the mat and went 19-5, making it back to the finals. Only this time, he fell to Missouri’s Keegan O’Toole, who just won his second straight title in 2023.

This past season, Griffith went 28-5 and finished in fifth place after a quarterfinals loss to Iowa State’s David Carr, the 2021 national champion at 157 pounds.

“I was planning on this being the last match of my career, but obviously not the way I wanted to go out so I’m probably going to take a couple of weeks off…get my head right,” Griffith said after his fifth place victory back in March.

In an Instagram post shortly thereafter the tournament, Griffith confirmed his intent to wrestle one more season.

“Did someone say one more?,” he wrote.

As far as where he goes, there are numerous options for Griffith. While he’s a career 165 pounder, there’s speculation he’d bump up to 174 pounds.

That’ll certainly open up his options. Such speculation, regardless of weight, led to the big players like Michigan and Penn State as potential options.

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The Wolverines and Nittany Lions could be a player, as well as Rutgers to add another Big Ten team in the mix. Griffith was a three-time New Jersey state champion at Bergen Catholic High School, squarely putting the Scarlet Knights in the mix.