Look at the top 10 of the latest college football polls. Notice anything odd? Anything missing? Look closer.
There’s only one team from the SEC.
Georgia, the two-time defending national champion, is No. 1. After that, to find another SEC team you have to count down 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, which is where mighty Alabama resides.
The SEC finished the 2022 season with three teams in the top 10, and the year before that it was two, and the year before that 3, then 4, then 4 …
It’s anyone’s guess as to account for this (good) turn of events — anything different is good — but a pretty good place to start would be the transfer portal, which beams thousands of players to different schools each year.
There are many things wrong with the transfer portal in its current form, but it’s not all bad. It is redistributing talent, and college football needs that. College football is stale. The national playoff is a winter rerun. It’s the same teams every year. Some mix of Alabama, Ohio State, Georgia, Clemson, Oklahoma … yawn.
Maybe the portal is changing things. Per ESPN, from April 1, 2022, to May 1, 2023, 3,284 players in the FBS division entered the transfer portal (the previous year it was 3,083). That’s 20% of all FBS players. That’s a lot of turnover and redistribution of talent.
It will take more time to see the exact effect that the transfer portal has exerted on the game. There isn’t a single Group of Five school (those from non-Power Five conferences) in the AP Top 25. So far, the best players are apparently being passed around the best teams, but there isn’t a single school in the country that isn’t gaining (and losing) players via the portal.
We’ve already seen that the portal can produce immediate results in isolated cases. When head coach Lincoln Riley left Oklahoma after the 2021 season to take the same job at USC, some 20 players transferred with him, including key players from his old school. Those players became USC’s starting quarterback (and Heisman Trophy winner), their top two running backs, three of their top four receivers, and five of the team’s top six scorers. USC went from 4-8 to 11-3 and Oklahoma from 11-2 to 6-7.
Colorado, one of the worst teams in the nation last year, collected 71 players from the portal and, just like that, the Buffalos are 3-0 and ranked 19th in the national polls.
It turns out that coaching might be a little overrated. The old adage that coaches are only as good as their players might actually be true. Bill Belichick’s New England Patriots are 25-27 since Tom Brady left town. Colorado was transformed overnight with an influx of 86 new players.
The transfer portal is seemingly affecting college football the same way the NCAA did years ago when it began to restrict the number of scholarships a school could offer. For decades there were no limits and schools could offer as many scholarships as they wanted; teams had 150 players or more on their rosters.
In 1973, the NCAA limited scholarships to 105 per school in a move to save money so schools could meet the demands of Title IX, which had been passed a year earlier. The NCAA cut scholarship limits again to 95 in 1978 and again to 85 in 1992 (63 for Division I-AA).
Whether intended or not, the scholarship cuts that helped fund women’s sports also created more parity. Previously, schools were stockpiling recruits simply to prevent their rivals from getting them. Good players might be stuck on the bench at the powerhouse schools, but at least their opponents couldn’t put them on the field against them. With scholarship limits, they could no longer do that and thus talent could be dispersed more evenly.
But it wasn’t enough. College football still has a parity problem. Certain conferences signed highly lucrative TV contracts that gave them money and power to control the game. College football contracted into five powerful conferences that stacked the deck in their favor, creating a path to the national championship that other conferences didn’t have. To wit: Since the inception of the College Football Playoff in 2015, there have been nine four-team playoffs. Power Five schools have claimed 34 of those 36 playoff slots.
The transfer portal has served to disperse talent again. Time will tell if it really changes anything.
