In September, it was announced after much preliminary discussion that the spring transfer portal would be done away with. After the old portal was done away with and each student was able to transfer an unlimited amount of times starting in 2022, the windows have shrunken each year. From each year on, they have been at a combined (winter and spring) 60 days, reduced to a combined 45 days, down to a combined 30 days last offseason. However, with the ruling recently, the winter portal will be the standalone portal in which football athletes can announce their intentions to transfer. As of the writing of this article, the dates are still up for debate with the original tentative date being January 2-11. There has been pushback over these dates with recommendation for the portal to be open through January 16 for the sake of the student athletes’ decision.
The arguable and reasonable hope for making this decision is ultimately to reduce roster turnover each year, which has become a significant problem with the rise of legalized pay for play in the sport. And with this decision, this certainly should make twice a year free agency and legal tampering not as prevalent! With this system, however, lies a deeper flaw, an issue that has not been as publicly addressed. That issue is student athletes.
While for the sake of the sport this portal idea is great and almost unanimously backed by coaches, the portal will likely still be open when the spring semester starts for students, meaning students will transfer and enroll after classes begin. As Kirby Smart noted too, the academic calendars do not align with the football calendar as much as they once did.
If one is to keep things transparent, college football right now is a business driven by large television companies and broadcasting rights. Compared to most other sports and NCAA divisions, the student in student athlete in Division 1 FBS football has progressively lost its way the past several years. Because of the nature of the sport, the emphasis is not the education of “elite student athletes,” as Virginia’s General Manager called his own. Yet as this is true, Seth Emerson of the Athletic notes how college football players are still involved in campus life and a part of their communities, even if it only for football. As he writes, “in this new era of NIL, online classes, luxurious football-only facilities and unlimited transfers, college football players are living a new version of the college experience,” an experience where truthfully, academics just don’t matter as much.