The College Football transfer portal has officially reached a new milestone everyone knew would happen but wondered when. After last year, when 2,689 players entered the portal (with only 63% finding a new home), 2024 has already surpassed that number, with ten days still remaining in the transfer window, according to On3 Sports.
This year, players were given two transfer portal windows, one in December and the second from April 15th to May 1st. In just the first five days of the second window, more than 400 players have entered their names into the portal, with hundreds more expected to enter before the window officially closes on May 1st. Additionally, graduate players may transfer anytime they want, and court rulings now suggest that players can transfer whenever they want, regardless of the window.
Low Success Rate Appears To Have Not Effected Transfers
Following last year’s 37% of players not finding a new team to play for, many believed that perhaps players would be more hesitant to enter the portal this year in fear of not finding a new team. However, in the first few days of the December window, it became very clear that this was not going to be the case, as more players entered the portal on the first day than ever before.
Up to this point, 47% of the nearly 2,700 players in the portal do not have a new team. That number will fall, but it looks like we could have a second year in a row where about one in three players who enter don’t find a new team.
Will The Transfer Portal Hit 3,000 Entrants?
Back in December, it looked like there would be 3,000 transfer portal entrants before the start of the 2024 season. However, things seem to have slowed somewhat since then, but it is still likely. 3,000 players entering the portal would be insane and viewed as a benchmark primarily because of the percentage of players represented within college football.
There are about 13,500 college football players in the FBS. Doing the math, 3,000 of those would come out to 22.5%. Considering that many players take a redshirt at some point, 3,000 players would statistically match up to just about every player would transfer at some point in their four-year + redshirt season.
Yes, some players transfer twice (or three or four times), but the fact that if the sport reaches 3,000 transfers, it would essentially mean a transfer for every 4.5 players is crazy. It will be interesting to watch in the coming years how many players walk on senior day who actually started their careers with the team they are being celebrated for.
Is that something that we should worry about? I’ll leave that up to you, the reader.
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