Is The NCAA Transfer Portal A Shield Or A Sword?

First appeared in BOXSCORE

By Aron Solomon

Spring has sprung in scenic Boulder.

This isn’t a complete list of players entering the NCAA transfer portal from the University of Colorado’s football team, as The Athletic reported on Wednesday.

The transfer portal has become a major issue for both the NCAA and the Colorado football program, with 23 players from Colorado now listed in the database.

Introduced in 2018, the NCAA transfer portal is a mechanism for ensuring compliance that enables student-athletes to express their intention to move between member institutions. Subsequently, coaches and staff members from other schools can approach the athlete and inquire about their willingness to explore the campus and receive a scholarship. While the primary objective of the portal is to promote transparency in the transfer process and provide greater autonomy to student-athletes, it has also given rise to some very reasonable ethical concerns regarding loyalty to institutions as well as practical concerns of institutional loyalty to players.

The Colorado situation highlights how the portal can be used as a sword by schools, just as it is used as a shield by players. While the portal aims to increase transparency and allow student-athletes to publicize their desire to transfer, it also provides an efficient and legal way for a new coach to “clean house,” as we are currently witnessing with the arrival of Deion Sanders’ “Coach Prime” era in Boulder.

As for Colorado, none of this is a surprise. As The Athletic piece reminds us:

“I’m bringing my luggage with me, and it’s Louis,” the Pro Football Hall of Famer famously told his team in their first meeting, referencing the luxury brand Louis Vuitton as a way of announcing better players would be joining the program. “I want y’all to get ready to go ahead and jump in that portal. … The more you jump in, the more room you make.”

Since the transfer portal opened in December, a total of 51 Buffaloes have entered or expressed their intention to transfer, with 46 of them doing so since Sanders took over as coach in December.

No other program has lost as many players as Sanders’ program. Coach Prime has been very active in showing players where the transfer portal door since being hired, even encouraging several to enter the portal at his first team meeting.

Sanders has signed 42 newcomers and is expected to bring in even more players. However, NCAA rules limit the number of scholarship players to 85 per year, so Sanders had to cull some players from the team purely from a practical perspective.

The cap on 25 signees in a single class has been eliminated, allowing coaches to turn over their roster faster than ever before. While players have until April 30 to enter the transfer portal, teams can still add players to their roster after the deadline.

Overall, the rate of transfers in college football is at its highest in history, and a signing cap is being discussed as a potential solution to the issue of roster numbers.

In this context, last year the NCAA made a significant rule change that allowed first-year coaches to cut players from the roster as long as the university honors their scholarship.

As Attorney Rich DiTomaso pointed out:

“As long as the university is careful to fulfill their legal obligations to the players and not violate admittedly rapidly-changing NCAA rules, athletic programs are free to make the changes they see fit in order to field the best possible team.”

As of the time of writing, there is no indication that the University of Colorado will fail to honor the scholarship of any of the players who have been cut from the program.

Ultimately, what’s at play at Colorado is pretty linear. Deion Sanders intends to use his time at the helm in Colorado to launch into the highest echelon of the college football coaching fraternity.

When Sanders was hired by Colorado, he was hired to coach what was regarded by experts as the worst Division 1 team in the nation.

In fact, a statistical analysis of the team’s performance found that they were widely considered the worst University of Colorado football team of the last 60 years, if not ever.

This football team has greatly struggled in recent years, with only three bowl game appearances in the past 15 seasons. However, the team has a storied history, including a national championship in 1990 and 26 conference championships over the course of its history.

It’s still April and Coach Prime has been under contract at Colorado for only four months. While no one expected the process of making Colorado football great again to be tidy, few anticipated it would be this immediately messy.

But absolutely no one should be surprised when Coach Prime acts like Coach Prime. With departing Colorado players describing Deion Sanders as “a businessman,” he would surely agree.

About Aron Solomon

A Pulitzer Prize-nominated writer, Aron Solomon, JD, is the Chief Legal Analyst for Esquire Digital and the Editor-in-Chief for Today’s Esquire. He has taught entrepreneurship at McGill University and the University of Pennsylvania, and was elected to Fastcase 50, recognizing the top 50 legal innovators in the world. Aron has been featured in Forbes, CBS News, CNBC, USA Today, ESPN, TechCrunch, The Hill, BuzzFeed, Fortune, Venture Beat, The Independent, Fortune China, Yahoo!, ABA Journal, Law.com, The Boston Globe, YouTube, NewsBreak, and many other leading publications.