Joel Klatt: College football needs 'guardrails' around transfer portal

The NCAA Transfer Portal has significantly changed college sports – there’s no question about it. If a player wants to leave a school for any reason, they can simply enter their name into the portal and take their talents elsewhere. It’s as simple as that.

Because of the simplicity, there’s been thousands of players – mostly from college football – enter their name into the portal over the past couple months, and there’s plenty more to come as players are entering each and every day.

FOX Sports college football analyst Joel Klatt joined The Herd with Colin Cowherd and provided his thoughts on the transfer portal, making it clear that he thinks there should be more rules and limitations to it.

Klatt explained that it is difficult to set limits on Name, Image and Likeness deals for players, but the transfer portal needs to be a bit more restricted.

“It’s hard to cap NIL because we don’t cap NIL for for NFL players,” Klatt said. “You can’t tell Patrick Mahomes, ‘Hey, there’s only a certain amount you can make from State Farm.’ We just don’t say that. It’s hard to get into that mold. But the guardrails as far as calendar and roster structure … there’s been 3,000 players enter the portal in the last two months. That’s too many. That’s too many.

“There’s going to be hundreds of college football players that threw away college scholarships and never get them back because of roster mismanagement and the lack of calendar structure and guardrails around the transfer portal.”

Transfer portal background information 

Check out the NCAA Transfer Portal Tracker.

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.