Report: West Virginia tight end heading to transfer portal

We might be in the middle of the basketball season, but there is important news coming out of West Virginia involving their football program. According to recent news, Mountaineers tight end Charles Finley has entered the transfer portal.

Finley is a three-star recruit from the 2020 class out of DePaul Catholic high school in Wayne, NJ. According to our database, he is the 29 ranked player out of New Jersey and No.59 ranked tight end in his class.

The six-foot-four 215-pounder elected to redshift in his first year with the Mountaineers. In his second year, Finley didn’t do much on the field with limited playing time. Finley played in just one game early in the season against Eastern Kentucky. In that game, he recorded the only stats of his college career, one catch for two yards.

Transfer portal background 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.