NCAA approves changes to limit transfer portal window to 45 days for all sports

The NCAA has approved changes to the transfer portal windows in all sports, it announced on Wednesday morning.

The transfer portal windows for football will now be 30 days after the conclusion of the season, as well as 15 days in the spring. The transfer portal window for men’s and women’s basketball will be 45 days. The council’s actions are not final until a meeting concludes later today.

Previously the window for football following the conclusion of the season was 45 days, but many coaches lobbied for a shorter window.

Arkansas‘ Sam Pittman was among them.

“I personally believe that it’s open too long,” Pittman said this offseason on the Paul Finebaum Show. “I think it needs to close down. I think kids who go in the transfer portal know they’re going to transfer way faster than 45 days.”

He wasn’t the only SEC coach of that opinion, either. South Carolina‘s Shane Beamer also chimed in during the offseason on the idea that the transfer portal windows were too generous.

“There was talk, I guess last year at this time there was talk about that window going like all the way through May, which I’ll be honest would be awful,” Beamer said.

“If a guy’s going to transfer, he knows he’s transferring by the end of spring practice. He doesn’t need the whole month of May to figure it out. So I think from that standpoint, the fact that the window was shorter it gave players time to go through spring practice, kind of see where they are and if there’s better opportunities for them elsewhere they can explore it. But it’s not too long where it gets drug out too long.”

There were a handful of reasons that coaches wanted a shorter transfer portal window, but the majority of them boiled down to time management. It’s difficult for coaches to juggle the transfer portal, bowl season and the late recruiting push all at the same time.

The shorter window is designed to alleviate some of that.

But it also could potentially reduce the risk of tampering, a problem that exists and has forced coaches to go on the defensive with their own rosters at times.

“Some of the behaviors that really raise questions about tampering, the use of NIL, those seem to happen, not exclusively, but later as that portal drags on,” SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said. “And the observation from our coaches is, ‘Can we reduce those windows?’ I think there’s a need to engage.”