Blatant Homerism: Time to get the transfer mix right
It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that among players selected in the NFL draft, the number who transferred at some point in their careers is climbing rapidly. Between the 2022 and 2025 drafts, the total increased by nearly 270% from 35 to 93.
The growth in transfer players selected coincides with significant relaxations in the restrictions on player movement since 2021.
For college football programs that prioritize winning, seeing their players get drafted isn’t the ultimate goal. However, the teams that win the most have the most players selected by NFL franchises year after year. That’s not a coincidence.
But what does the major uptick in transfers picked in the draft tell us about building college football programs?
When about a third of all NFL draft picks in a year transferred at some point in their college careers, you can’t deny that teams like Oklahoma can find quality players in the transfer portal every year. That should go without saying.
On the other hand, according to data from On3, the number of players entering the transfer portal per year shot up from 786 in 2021 to 3,310 in 2024. That means the growth in the annual number of players on the transfer market was around 420% during the period in question. As such, the increase in the number of prospects who transferred – or attempted to transfer – far outpaced the growth in transfers selected in the draft. (We should note the additional year of eligibility granted to players stemming from the Covid-19-impacted season of 2020 is acting as a confounding factor in this period, too.)
Naturally, as the percentage of players who transferred increases in the pool of available draft prospects, so too will the overall number of draft picks who transferred. Using NFL draft picks as a proxy for the level of talent available in the transfer portal, the implication is that the expanding transfer crop is still yielding a huge amount of chaff relative to wheat. College programs need highly effective screens, in other words, to eliminate transfer players most unlikely to contribute from their candidates for acquisition.
And now time for beating a dead horse: The Sooners’ recent problems start with their annual influx of transfers. Since the 2022 recruiting cycle, a total of 66 transfer players have entered the program versus 94 recruits in four years. As such, about 40% of the new players joining the program under Brent Venables’ watch were transfers.
If you asked Venables why the program has rolled with oversized transfer classes, he’d likely tell you it’s a matter of necessity. He took over a roster in disrepair. The squad OU fielded in 2022 included a total of just 36 scholarship players who were on the team a year earlier. That left Venables and his staff with little choice but to backfill with transfers to paper over huge holes in their personnel.
In that regard, the 2025 team feels like the first one that Venables truly owns. He has four recruiting classes under his belt. All holdovers from the Riley era have graduated. The 85 scholarship players on the team consist of 64 who signed with OU as high school recruits and 21 transfers.
From a 10,000-foot view, the biggest red flag around this team seems to be the number of “plug-and-play” transfers expected to play prominent roles on the team. The starting lineup could include as many as nine players who joined the program this year, most of whom are on the offensive side of the ball. Now in year four, that doesn’t reflect well on the staff’s development of offensive players in the previous three seasons.
Rebuffing that criticism about offensive development is a matter for later, though. In the here and now, the ‘25 season should offer an unvarnished assessment of Venables’ acumen as a roster builder.
Picks and Recs: Sinners
Basic, but add me to the list of people hailing director Ryan Coogler’s latest film as a masterpiece.
Interestingly, the film gets its true weight more so from a wealth of stunning individual moments and beats than the story it’s telling. Scenes like the vibrant musical numbers or Delroy Lindo’s Delta Slim recounting the lynching of a bandmate pack a far greater wallop than the conventional horror elements that take charge in the second half of the film. (Lindo gives a remarkable performance and should hear his name called often during awards season.) Coogler even mines gold out of a brilliant mid-credits scene that changed how I read the movie.
Based on the crowds packing theaters, you’ve probably already seen Sinners. If not, seriously, what are you waiting for?