Blatant Homerism: A portal to nowhere
Aside from pressure on head coach Ryan Day, the big story around the Ohio State Buckeyes prior to the 2024 season was an offseason spending spree by the program’s boosters.
OSU backers supposedly dropped around $20 million on the collection of supremely talented players who brought a national championship home to Columbus last week. Part of that allocation went to winning the services of high-profile transfers, including:
Quarterback Will Howard from Kansas State;
Safety Caleb Downs and offensive lineman Seth McLaughlin from Alabama; and
Running back Quinshon Judkins from Ole Miss.
However, most of the transfer traffic at Ohio State in 2024 was headed out of town: Nine transfer players joined the program prior to the season, and 26 former Buckeyes left it. As Andy Staples of On3 pointed out recently in an article heralding the end of the “superteam era” in college football, OSU largely fielded a squad of blue-chip recruits who marinated for three to five years in Columbus. The bulk of all that money OSU boosters spent on building the 2024 team actually went to keeping players like defensive linemen Jack Sawyer and J.T. Tuimoloau in the fold.
As such, most of OSU’s pivotal players were recruited to Columbus out of high school. The transfers who joined the team filled in roster holes or supplemented what the Buckeyes already had at their disposal.
Can teams that rely heavily on the transfer portal to stock their rosters to win national championships? Sure.
As players have come to view transferring as an opportunity to hasten their development and capitalize on financial opportunities, the transfer portal has become more than just a haven for players who grew disillusioned or washed out at their previous stops. Ole Miss, for example, may not have won a title this year, but the Rebels fielded one of the strongest squads in the country with an assortment of one-year rentals and contributors who started their careers at other schools.
However, reshuffling the deck every season with a massive influx of new faces presents major challenges in terms of maintaining continuity and building a resilient culture in your program. It also leaves you at the mercy of what you can actually find in the transfer market. Perhaps most importantly in the new landscape of college football, teams with immediate needs to fill theoretically lose their bargaining power in negotiations with players. That makes them prone to overpaying for the quality of talent they can acquire and poor stewards of the resources provided by the schools and their boosters.
And that brings me to my greatest frustration with Brent Venables’ tenure as head coach of the Oklahoma Sooners.
Venables got the OU job after the 2021 season at the very moment when relaxation of the transfer rules in college sports kicked into high gear. Between 13 transfers out of the program, graduations and early departures for the NFL, and Lincoln Riley’s putrid roster management, Venables didn’t have much choice but to go heavy with additions from the transfer portal for 2022. (In fact, you could make a case that he should have been more aggressive in purging the roster and dipping into the transfer ranks.)
But it’s 2025, and OU still remains in the double-digit range for scholarship transfer players with 10 in this class. By my count, the Sooners have put 51 transfer players on scholarship in four recruiting cycles. Venables gave little indication he wanted to use the transfer portal liberally when he took the gig at OU – the opposite, in fact. So why have the Sooners failed to throttle back?
Ironically, Riley’s apparent fondness for transfers over high school recruits forced OU’s hand to a degree after he left. The Sooners signed just 15 players from the prep ranks in the 2021 recruiting class, Riley’s final group as OU’s head coach. They looked to be on course for another small class in 2022 before Riley skipped town; OU added nine players to the fold after Venables was hired to bring the total size of the group to 22. That left OU scraping the portal for additions to backfill the roster holes created by the combination of the tiny ‘21 class and immediate attrition of players after Riley’s departure. Scholarships for portal players took the place of high school recruits as a result.
Compounding the problem, the Sooners signed a total of four prep offensive linemen in the ‘21 and ‘22 classes. With so few prospects at a position group that requires five players, OU had to rely on what it could find in the bargain bin to make up for that lack of investment in the big uglies.
Finally, there’s the ultimate motivating factor: pressure to win. That probably accounts for OU’s oversized transfer class this year. When a head coach knows he can’t afford another flop of a season, immediate fixes take precedence over players who might need a couple years to blossom. Hence, Venables allocated nearly as many roster spots in the most recent class to transfers, 15, as prep recruits, 18.
Superteams stacked with upperclassmen who worked their way up the ranks in one program may die out as Staples predicts. On balance, however, going too heavy on transfers presents just as many risks to the long-term health of a college football program as not taking any at all.
It will still be better to build squads around high school recruiting, as opposed to scouring the waiver wire every offseason. Transfers should fortify teams, in other words, rather than serving as the foundation. You could point to the Buckeyes’ success as the model for prudent use of the transfer portal.
No matter who the head coach of OU football is going forward, weening the team’s personnel pipeline off the transfer portal should be one of the program’s top priorities.
Picks and Recs: A Real Pain
The big buzz around director and star Jesse Eisenberg’s travelogue about two cousins on a Holocaust tour in Poland has been the performance of Macaulay Culkin’s brother. He is stellar as a drifter who doesn’t shift between misanthropic and endearing so much as he somehow melds the two together in every moment.
The script doesn’t give Eisenberg as much room to dazzle playing the strait-laced member of the pairing. But that seems to make it even more poignant to watch him come to terms with his anguish over what he sees as the sad aimlessness that has become his cousin’s life.
If it sounds like A Real Pain is a downer, it’s not at all. Give it a whirl if you have Hulu.