Curtis Murayama: Transfer portal now despicable term for coaches

COVID-19 has dominated our lives for the better part of two years.

But there’s a two-word term that probably has caused as much angst to college football coaches and administrators — “transfer portal.”

“The only time ADs (who) compete against each other every day have emergency phone calls is to talk about COVID, except for now we’re having emergency phone calls to talk about what’s going on with the transfer portal and how can we slow this down?” Wyoming athletic director Tom Burman said on a local radio show.

Although the portal has been in existence since 2018, a major change took place on April 28 that rocked college football.

That’s when the NCAA Division I Board of Directors ratified the adoption of a one-time transfer rule that would allow student-athletes at four-year institutions to change schools and immediately become eligible to play.

It’s basically created a new era of free agency in all levels of college football and triggered a firestorm of complaints among coaches and administrators.

“It’s crazy. It’s really sad, to be honest with you,” Clemson coach Dabo Swinney said last month on signing day. “There’s right around 2,000 kids in the portal and most of them don’t have anywhere to go. There’s so much tampering going on and so many adults manipulating young people.”

Hawaii athletic director Dave Matlin tweeted: “The amount of transfers has become a reality of college football, and we’re no strangers to it. The amount of transfers (at UH) is disappointing, however not unusual compared to many other schools around the country, and even within our own conference.”

Putting aside the criticism directed at UH coach Todd Graham and whether it’s justified or not, here are some numbers around the Mountain West Conference:

>> Hawaii has had more than a dozen players in the transfer portal this offseason, including six starters, one them being captain and quarterback Chevan Cordeiro, who is moving on to MWC rival San Jose State.

>> Colorado State has 16 players in the portal, including quarterback Todd Centeio, according to an MWC transfer portal tracker on mwwire.com.

>> Nevada has had 15 in the portal, with nine following head coach Jay Norvell to in-conference foe Colorado State after he was wooed away from the Wolf Pack.

>> Wyoming has had 10, according to the Casper Star Tribune (20, according to local radio), and that number included two quarterbacks, one being starter Levi Williams, who’s moving on to another MWC member, Utah State.

“The bottom line is that as a football program we cannot sustain a situation where we have these kinds of departures right at the end of the season with this number of important players,” Burman said. “We can’t do that from year to year to year. We’d be in deep trouble.”

He equated it to losing an entire recruiting class, the impact of which would cripple a program for years.

That’s where the NCAA needs to step in and save the sport.

I’m all for player empowerment. Student-athletes in college football — the lifeline for every athletic program — have been taken advantage of for decades with little or no compensation. So they should be allowed to leave or be eligible immediately if they feel it’ll better their future, give them more playing time or improve their mental health.

Furthermore, why should players be beholden to a program when the coaches who recruited them are allowed to leave anytime for a higher-paying job and a higher-profile program?

The student-athletes deserve to have some leverage.

But not total control, because that’s led to a total lack of control and a free-for-all nature.

Maybe one adjustment could be not to grant student-athletes immediate eligibility when they jump to a school in the same conference.

For instance, in the Pac-12, Colorado has 12 in the portal, according to sportspac12.com. But none is headed to another Pac-12 school. Arizona State has seven in the portal, with four headed to schools with historically better football programs at Ohio State, Florida State, Oklahoma and Nebraska.

So the cannibalizing within the conference has to stop, and the NCAA has to step in to deter situations like what happened at Nevada, which has had a mass exodus of players who followed the coach from Nevada to Colorado State. Or what happened in the Southeastern Conference.

This season Alabama acquired Tennessee’s two-time starter and defensive leader, linebacker Henry To’o To’o, while Georgia landed LSU tight end Arik Gilbert.

Burman said he hopes the NCAA will develop “guardrails” for the portal to prevent Power 5 schools from pilfering players from the lower ranks.

“These people representing Power 5 schools are reaching out to kids during the season and saying ‘Hey, we’re interested in you if you get in the portal.’ We need to try to curtail that.”

Even though Burman said it’s probably a third party not employed by the school who’s making illegal contact, he feels the coaches need to be held accountable, and that the NCAA needs to make it a “Level I (major) violation.”

According to ncaa.org, a student-athlete must “certify in writing, along with their new head coach, they did not have direct or indirect communication with the new school’s athletics staff prior to entering the NCAA Transfer Portal.”

“I do think one thing that will help slow this down is what we’re going to see this year in particular, and we saw it last year in basketball,” Burman said. “A lot of these kids do not end up on Division I rosters, and they do not end up in the situation they wanted and they’re starting to come out and talk about it.”