MORGANTOWN, W. Va. — There may be no better way to introduce the impact the NCAA Transfer Portal has had on college athletics than with the Syracuse women’s basketball team.
In 2016, the Orange lost to Connecticut in the national championship game and Syracuse has been in the NCAA tournament in four of the five seasons that followed, including a second-round loss to Connecticut this season.
In the midst of one of the strongest runs in school history, 12 players have since entered the portal and are looking to continue their college careers elsewhere.
That’s 12 players — NCAA women’s hoops teams allow 15 scholarship players per season — from one team in the span of two months.
“I saw that,” WVU women’s basketball coach Mike Carey said. “That kind of shows you just how much the portal has changed everything. It shows you just how much the power is in the athletes’ hands right now. It’s not the coaches and the schools with the power, the athletes have the power.”
The situation at Syracuse may be an extreme, but transfer numbers across NCAA athletics are on the rise.
According to an NCAA study released in 2020, 15.3% — roughly 700 athletes — of men’s basketball players at Division I schools transferred to another Division I school in the 2018-19 school year. The figure did not include the number of players who transferred to a school at a lower NCAA division. That number was 9.5% in 2004, the study said.
In women’s basketball, the number of transfers from one Division I school to another was 11.9% (roughly 627), which was up from 7.8% in 2004.
Those percentages were not the highest. That honor belonged to men’s soccer, where 18.6% of its athletes transferred from one Division I school to another, up from 11.8% in 2004.
In football, the numbers were mostly consistent, from 3.9% transferring in 2004 to 4.6% (roughly 509) in 2019 from one FBS school to another.
Handling the rise of transfer numbers across all the sports had begun to become a paperwork nightmare for university compliance offices, which is where we begin the story of how the portal came to be, what it exactly is and the impact it will have on the future of college athletics.
What is the transfer portal?
The portal officially opened for all NCAA Division I and II schools in the fall of 2018.
In its purest sense, the portal itself is nothing more than a database on the internet.
It is password-protected and the compliance office at each school gives head coaches and assistant coaches an individual password.
While compliance officials can browse through the thousands of names from each sport, the coaches’ passwords allow them to only see the athletes in the sports they coach.
WVU men’s basketball head coach Bob Huggins can not browse through football transfers, not that he’s much of a browser of the portal to begin with.
“I hardly look at it,” Huggins said. “I’m not on it very much at all.”
The portal is not a dating site, either. The athletes who enter it have no access to their profiles.
Where it gets interesting is the portal is not technically a recruiting website, much like Rivals.com, where you can see lists of the top high school recruits from around the country in different sports and what schools they are being recruited by.
There are no five and four-star ratings next to an athlete’s name in the portal. There are no headshots, no stats, no 40-yard dash times, no positions played, not even their heights or weights are listed.
What you will find accompanied with each athlete’s profile are answered questions such as their academic standing, how much eligibility they have remaining and whether or not the athlete has been redshirted.
If the athlete competes in a conference that prohibits intra-conference transferring, that is also listed.
Contact info is also listed. Athletes have the option of releasing their cell phone numbers or just an email address.
“Yeah, it’s really not as exciting as most people probably think it is,” Carey said. “You see the names, but not much else that would let you know if that player can help you or not. The coaches have to do the research.
“The good thing is, you’re already familiar with most of the names from scouting them or seeing them play in high school.”
While the database is used by hundreds of college coaches for recruiting purposes, the portal’s truest purpose is to cut down on much of the leg work compliance officials have to do in order to complete an athlete’s transfer by NCAA standards.
In pre-portal days, an athlete wishing to transfer would have to keep what was called a transfer tracer handy.
The tracer was paperwork that contained the basic information now found in the portal that had to be signed by the school to officially release the athlete, as well as the school which took the athlete in.
Once complete, the tracer had to be either mailed or faxed back to the original school in order for the transfer to be compliant with NCAA regulations.
Now, all of that is done with a couple clicks of a mouse.
It’s also easy for an athlete to enter the portal.
According to NCAA rules, athletes do not even have to notify their coaches they are transferring, although most do.
They only need to visit their school’s compliance office and fill out a form that asks general questions about eligibility and academic standing.
WVU also asks athletes their reasons for transferring on the form, but it is optional whether they give a reason or not.
Once the form is filled out, a school has two business days to enter the athlete’s name in the portal.
Once in the portal, an athlete’s life can become hectic quickly.
“It starts with text messages,” said former WVU men’s basketball guard Jordan McCabe, who transferred to UNLV in April. “Once your name goes into the portal, the messages begin almost immediately.
“It’s usually stuff like, “What are you looking for?’ or “Here’s what we have to offer,’ stuff like that.”
The text messages then turn into phone calls, about 10 hours worth on a daily basis, according to McCabe.
“My girlfriend wants to throw my cell phone into the Mon River,” he joked. “That’s kind of how hectic it gets.”
The portal’s impact
The NCAA granted a blanket waiver in 2020 for athletes in all sports to transfer without having to sit out a season due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
In April, the NCAA passed a rule granting athletes in all sports to transfer once and gain immediate eligibility.
Technically, the ruling is not because of the availability of the transfer portal, but the portal is now taking the brunt of frustration from coaches who oppose the rule.
“If they pass immediate eligibility, you’ll see teams recruiting in the handshake line after games,” Huggins once said before the rule was passed. “I think passing the rule is one of the worst things they could do.”
As of May 7, there were nearly 1,300 names in the men’s basketball portal. There were more than 1,000 in 2020.
In 2020, 964 scholarship FBS football players entered the portal, according to an article published by Sports Illustrated, with nearly a third of them not finding another home at a Division I school.
Some men’s and women’s basketball players also do not find new schools at the Division I level, due to the number of incoming high school and junior-college recruits that are signed.
“Right now, there are a lot of kids in the portal that are not going to find scholarships,” Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby said in the Sports Illustrated article. “There may be twice as many people in the portal as there are places to transfer. There will be some who won’t be able to go to college if they don’t get a scholarship.”
With the influx of new names available, though, the portal has become a viable option in recruiting.
“It gives you a chance for a quick fix,” said Carey, who lost three players to the portal in 2021, but also signed three players from the portal who will play next season. “It’s become another option. If you don’t maybe get the high school player you want, you used to go the junior-college route, but now you can go right into the portal.”
As far as monitoring the portal, Huggins and Carey said they have assigned assistant coaches who check daily for new names that may have entered it.
The WVU men’s hoops team also lost forwards Emmitt Matthews Jr. and Oscar Tshiebwe to the portal, along with McCabe, but the Mountaineers signed forwards Pauly Paulicap from DePaul and Dimon Carrigan (FIU), as well as guard Malik Curry (Old Dominion).
“We went for needs,” Huggins said. “We had a need for a shot blocker, which was something we didn’t have last season. I think we got two of the best ones in the country (in Paulicap and Carrigan). We have Deuce (McBride) looking at the (NBA) draft, so we had a need to go out and get some help there.”
The portal’s future
The one lingering question or theory about the future of the portal is whether it changes how coaches feel about recruiting high school athletes?
The questions coaches may be asking themselves: Why bother signing a high school prospect if the math says they are likely to transfer to another school?
“You hear coaches talk that way,” Huggins said. “It’s a risk recruiting a high school player now, especially if you don’t think they can come in and play right away. If they don’t play, they’re probably going to go somewhere else where they can play.”
Is Huggins among the coaches considering no longer signing high school prospects?
“No, the portal hasn’t really changed our approach to recruiting,” he said. “We’ll try to go after the best player we can find and that includes high school guys.
“I do want to see how this whole thing plays out with the portal. You certainly have to pay attention to it.”
The portal takes and it gives
WVU by the numbers in football, men’s basketball and women’s basketball since the NCAA Transfer Portal opened in 2018:
FOOTBALL: The Mountaineers have lost 36 scholarship players to the portal and have signed 12 transfers. WVU has signed three, so far, who will be eligible for next season.
MEN’S BASKETBALL: WVU has had eight scholarship players transfer out and have signed four. Three players have been signed from the portal for next season, including Malik Curry (right), who played at Old Dominion last season.
WOMEN’S BASKETBALL: WVU has had nine scholarship players enter the portal, while signing seven. The Mountaineers have signed three who will play next season.
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