How the transfer portal window for basketball, football creates chaos

The NCAA transfer portal has opened up for college basketball, leading to a whirlwind of news daily with big-time players hopping in and out as they find new programs. And even though the football transfer window isn’t open yet, there has been news on that front.

Alabama received a verbal commitment of sorts from former offensive lineman Kadyn Proctor, who plans to re-enter the transfer portal and head back to Tuscaloosa when it opens on April 16.

The timing of everything is all a little chaotic.

“My biggest problem with all of this is the calendar is a mess,” BOL’s Tim Watts said on the Andy Staples On3 show. “That’s my first thing, fix the calendar. There’s no way these things should be crossing over the way they are.”

Football’s spring window is a little cleaner than the winter window, which begins right before bowl season does. Myriad issues have popped up with having the transfer window right in the middle of coach firing season and bowl prep, not the least of which is trying to juggle everything all at once.

Basketball’s calendar might be even crazier. The portal window opened on Monday, well before the NCAA Tournament is even set to begin.

So you’ll have teams potentially playing in the NCAA Tournament that are either worried about players hitting the portal from their roster or trying to comb through the portal to find additions while also scouting for upcoming postseason opponents.

“This window being open right now for 45 days, you’re probably struggling to keep everybody on your team right now,” Watts explained. “You’ve got guys on the end of your bench at a really good program who want to go somewhere else and he sees these guys commit to the bigger programs as they start to trickle out and commit, they’re going to be urging to go.

“So if you’re playing in the Final Four, as great as that experience is, you’re almost going to have to look at it, ‘Do I play in the Final Four and miss my shot or do I go in the portal and try to find my school?’ Made a lot of decisions really hard for a lot of these players.”

Though there won’t be quite the chaos with the timing on the calendar for the spring transfer window in football, it’ll also likely be pretty hectic.

We’ve already seen guys like Proctor make their plans well before the portal opens.

“You know, I don’t know what to expect. I think it’s easy to say it’s going to be crazy, because that’s a guaranteed fact,” Watts said. “There’s no doubt it’s going to be crazy. Just the portal from Alabama’s perspective along with Proctor and Keon Sabb, just the guys coming in have been crazy. Not so much the Washington guys, they knew this staff, that made perfect sense.

“But you have a lot of things happening now with guys at other schools and when they get there they might not be happy with their NIL deals after spring practice, they might not be happy with their role, their assistant coach that recruited them could have left, their position coach could have left. So the sky’s the limit. We’re seeing that in basketball right now. We have teams in the NCAA; Alabama got a commitment from a portal guy yesterday while they’re flying to Spokane to play in the NCAA Tournament.”

Point being: Be ready for anything. When the portal window opens, the craziness begins.