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Inside how college football’s transfer portal works: Coaches, players and agents dish on NIL
The Athletic College Football
May 13, 2024
College football’s transfer portal has become more hectic by the year since it launched in 2018, as it’s been made more complicated by unlimited transfers and, of course, players being able to profit off their name, image and likeness.
So what is the transfer portal really like in the NIL age? The Athletic surveyed numerous coaches, NIL collective officials, agents, personnel staffers and players who have transferred on a variety of portal-related topics to open a window into college football’s version of free agency. All survey participants were granted anonymity in exchange for their candor and to preserve relationships.
Before the portal opens
College football has two transfer windows, at the end of the regular season in December and in late April. But for all involved, portal preparation is a year-round conversation — even if contact between schools and players is not permitted unless those players are in the portal.
Assistant coach 1: The main way it works is staffs — especially at the highest levels — have a whole crew of people that just watch film all day of other college teams. The same way you used to watch high school film, they watch college games and keep a board stocked with potential portal players. Even though none of these players are in the portal, they watch them and they find ways to let those people know that, “If you happen to go to the portal, you’ll have a home with us.” That’s happening a lot.
Assistant coach 2: They’ll start evaluating that tape ongoing through the season, and starting in October or November, contact gets made to the high school coach, player’s family or maybe a player on your roster knows the kid or played with him.
Player 1: I didn’t hear directly from coaches from other schools during the season, but I did hear through the grapevine that coaches would be interested in me if I did enter the portal because this coach from School X knew a teammate of mine because they were from the same area and told them to tell me that they were interested in me. A lot of people from certain teams had followed me on Twitter and other social media to kind of lay the groundwork if I were to enter the portal — at least that’s how I took it.
General manager 1: You can follow a kid on Instagram, you can like his stuff. You know if he’s liking your stuff back that he likes you, or if you follow him on Twitter and he follows you back — the kid is not dumb, that’s happening for a reason. Back a few years ago when people weren’t tampering as much, that’s the way you did it — hey, he followed me back! This could happen. Then sometimes the kids will just DM you and tell you they’re going in. I think there are some schools that straight up just call the kid, text them, talk to them. It’s reckless.
Head coach 1: It’s so out of control because everybody knows there’s not any regulations to it. It’s like you’re on the freeway, and there’s a speed limit but no cops. I mean, there is no regulatory body. Like there is in theory, but nobody cares.
General manager 1: We had an agent email a staffer, to their university email, a list of players who aren’t in the portal but were going to go in, asking if we had any interest. More often than not, if an agent is reaching out to schools about players, those players aren’t very good. If you have a dude who is going to get paid in the portal, that player is getting paid whether you’re shopping him around or not.
Agent 1: I had a defensive line coach reach out to me over winter break and he told me, “These are the positions I need to fill; send me the list of your guys who are willing to enter the portal.” I gave him a list. It was as simple as that.
Agent 2: There are other programs that just ask the player directly in warm-ups.
Player 2: There was a school that, after we played them, one of their coaches came up and talked to me. “Hey, I know it was a bad deal here. I’m not really allowed to say much, but for what it’s worth, you have really big fans over here and I want you to know that. I know you’re entering the portal soon.” I was like, “OK, cool.”
Head coach 2: Nothing is sacred anymore. And it’s really hard and confusing for the players. Even if they don’t want to go anywhere, they’re still hearing from so many people. I could see it at the end of last year ahead of the bowl game. The only players in our program who looked like they were in a good headspace were the kids who had already transferred. Then a couple weeks later, they changed the transfer rule anyway (to allow unlimited transfers).
Player 3: I didn’t really hear from any schools during the season. I think most people thought, including myself, that I was looking to enter the draft and I really wasn’t looking down that route, so I don’t think those schools were viewing me as a potential portal prospect either. But then I was thinking, “I do have one year of eligibility left,” and I was hearing that I was projected to be a late Day 2 or Day 3 pick, so I felt like if I do have this one more year where I could play in the Power 5 to boost my draft stock, I might as well take it.
Agent 3: There are absolutely kids going into the portal that don’t want to go into the portal, but the parents orchestrate it. And a big thing now is (collectives giving) a separate NIL stipend for parents to go to the games. Because that gets expensive. You can get a situation where the player gets a certain amount of money, but the parents take a big chunk out of it, so now it’s a big thing for the parents to get a separate NIL stipend. And that’s a big thing for the kids, because the parents are a big influencer.
Agent 2: It’s a feel test. I look at their circumstances — their playing time, the coaching staff, the regional fit, the needs by other schools, the family situation. You can figure it out.
Entering the portal
The second a player’s name appears in the transfer portal, it’s like a high school recruitment all over again, only in a tighter time frame and with a history of college production to point to. Plus, there are financial conversations to be had.
Player 3: As soon as I entered the portal, my DMs started blowing up that night and it just kept going from there. It was definitely a cool experience. Coming out of high school, I didn’t get that kind of attention. It was cool to have these two very different recruiting experiences, going from being this guy who was really under the radar that no one knew about to being seen as a top guy in the portal.
Player 4: If I had to give a rough estimate, it’d be probably 20 to 25 schools.
Player 5: A LOT. Lots. Like maybe 60 or 70.
Player 1: At least 50. Probably more. The schools that I had multiple calls with and tried to maintain a relationship for at least a week or so were probably between 25 and 30.
Player 2: The first time (I transferred) I talked to 15 schools. The second time I kind of knew going in, so I had like four that I was talking to, but I probably talked to everybody. I talked to UConn. I never didn’t answer the phone.
Assistant coach 3: Portal recruiting is actually like speed dating. There are some advantages to it. You get straight to the brass tacks of it, right? Now, that’s the thing too with these portal kids. Instead of doing 72-hour visits, you’re doing 24-hour visits. Getting them in and out, showing them the depth chart, showing them the opportunities, talking about the NIL aspect and how they can take advantage of that. It’s more of a business model.
General manager 1: We’ve had players tell us that the first thing they did when they went on a different visit was meet with the NIL folks. The strategy there is if you float a number that they like, then they decide they like that place. It makes them view a visit differently as opposed to wondering the whole visit what the money might be. If you’re walking around some crappy facility but know you’d be making bank, well that’s fine. But that really only works if you’re offering more than others. Our strategy was to have NIL people meet with them at the end of the visit to make sure we weren’t talking money with players we didn’t like or didn’t end up wanting based on how the visit went. We wanted to vet them and feel them out first.
Player 5: NIL was a big part of the process. Obviously, I wanted to be compensated. I wanted to be paid in the market of my position value. I tried to figure out what my NIL value was from hearing what other guys got from agents and what other guys in the market were making by talking to some of my friends at Power 5 schools to find out what they were getting. I’d talk to them over social media.
How the deal is done
In February, a federal judge in Tennessee blocked the NCAA from enforcing its prohibitions against recruits signing monetary deals with booster groups. Though the NCAA has sought to restrict the use of NIL as a recruiting inducement, financial conversations are becoming much more direct between NIL collectives and transfers.
NIL collective CEO 1: We’re in direct contact with our coaches about roster management daily. It’s three conversations — high school recruiting, which is the smallest piece, it’s your current roster, and it’s portal recruiting. And we’re talking to our coaching staff daily, weekly, about all three buckets. It was a needed change. Now that everything’s kind of out in the open, the athletes now have full visibility of what each particular school is offering, and we can communicate with our coaches now, which helps us manage budgets and rosters.
NIL collective CEO 2: That wall of separation that was supposed to exist between collectives and student-athletes was enjoined by that district court decision.
NIL collective CEO 3: I’m told to make contact once there’s an official visit set up, and usually I’m making contact with a parent or an agent. It’s been very agent-heavy lately, especially during the December portal. I was on the phone with agents every day.
General manager 1: If you’re dealing with a high-quality transfer, it’s usually an agent. If it’s a G5 kid or something like that, it’s usually the kid and their parents.
Player 3: I’ve been hearing from a ton of agents, even prior to me entering the portal because of the NFL. But then once I went into the portal, I heard from a lot more agents who said they wanted to build a relationship through NIL to represent me. But I just felt like I didn’t really need that, so I decided not to go with anyone.
Agent 4: I abide really conservatively to the solicitation rules. Anybody that comes to me is strictly referral-based.
Agent 5: We don’t really target clients that are trying to enter the portal. In our experience, we have clients who are already clients that want to enter the portal. There’s been maybe a couple rare situations where we’ve been called to assist someone enter the portal, but that’s not usually how we do it. That’s not our target clientele.
Player 5: I did use an agent, but just in the beginning part of it. I think he got my number from someone. I honestly don’t know how that worked, and then I had a bunch of agents reach out asking me to do NIL representation. I had friends who went through a similar (process).
Agent 1: Yes, we’re an agency and charge a percentage of the contract negotiated with a collective or marketing agreement. But we’re really an athlete development company. I’m not jumping into who is making money in the portal and how do I place him at Team X so I get a cut out of it. For me, it’s how do we build out your brand, monetize that and then put you in position to become the player you want to be. We want guys who want more than the bag. We take our clients on a case-by-case basis.
Agent 6: We had a kid who signed, and then two days later he went in the portal and asked to get out of our contract. We could’ve been a–holes and said no, but we said sure. I assume he was working with someone else who could get a certain offer.
Personnel staffer 1: Some of them are highly qualified agents who are reputable and have history and background of success within the world. Then you have this other group of agents who have no f—ing clue what they’re doing. They’re just latching on. A kid hits the portal and all these agents are just sharks DMing them. These kids are like, “My buddy got an agent and made $100,000 — I should get one too.” So they get this agent on Twitter and this guy has no idea what he’s talking about and is asking for 10, 15, 20 percent of the contract when the NFL maximum is 3 percent.
Head coach 2: I had a player commit to me, to my face, on a visit. And I asked if we needed to talk business, and the player said, “No, I’m good, just talk to my agent.” And the agent was out of this world, saying it would cost $800,000 to $1.2 million. OK, well, sorry, we’re out. Is the kid really going to get that money? I don’t know. But he’s not coming here now.
Agent 1: They’re kids. They’re gonna grab the cash. But at the same time a lot of them have their heads screwed on straight. So, even if they get an offer to go to another school who may pay them more, our kids are taking the long-term play over the short-term play. But I do know there are kids out there who want the upfront bag because they don’t think they’re good enough to get the bigger one on the back end.
Agent 6: Unless the money’s crazy, find the best fit. Someone can take the most money and it’s also the best fit.
Player 3: The NIL I am getting is very generous, so no complaints there, but it is mostly football. But if it came down to two schools that were equal from a football standpoint with what the opportunities were, then NIL would’ve been the next thing after all that.
Player 1: A lot of the conversations that I had, the head coaches would bring up money directly. They would talk about the numbers that they give to players at my position based on how much value they deem based on the level of recruit that you are and how much playing time you’ll have and what you mean to the team.
Personnel staffer 1: I like to think of it as an amusement park. If you’re really thirsty at an amusement park, you buy a bottle of water, and it costs $16 or whatever. But you need it. If you really need a position, you’re probably going to overpay. There are traditional programs and transactional programs. Those guys who ask about money to even come on a visit, they’ll fit in the transactional world.
Personnel staffer 1: We had a situation where a player said he was getting offered $350,000 from another school. So we reached out to someone we knew from that other school and they told us that was nowhere near what they were offering. Which made sense. He was a good player, we wanted him, but are you serious? $350,000?
We had another kid ask for $800,000 in the portal, and to be honest, we didn’t know if he was serious. We thought he was f—ing with us. But he wasn’t. He did end up coming down to $400,000, and even that was too much.
General manager 1: You have to have the balls to say no to the players or stand up to the agents. If you open up your hand, they’re just going to try to eat from it at all times. We had a player who wasn’t very good tell us on a visit he would sign immediately if we promised him $15,000 a month. Yeah, no s— you would.
Agent 2: I prefer to deal with the coaches because they’re so out of their element. They’re like, “We can get it done.” There’s an ego thing — you want to get it done for your position group and your school, show you’ve got money.
Agent 3: The coaches are in many cases their own worst enemy because they’re lying to kids, enticing them with those lies to come to their college campus, then the kids get there and they’re like, “Hey, that’s not what you said.” It doesn’t take long for them to figure out they’ve been misled. So if things don’t go well that first semester, that’s one of the reasons they’re like, “Forget this place. I’m going to the portal.”
NIL collective CEO 4: You have to know what the coaches want, and the collective, somehow, has to be operating consistently with how the coaches want their program run. You try to be as careful as possible with the rules, but at the end of the day you can’t have donors doing the recruiting, and you can’t have donors managing the roster. So it’s this weird, awkward dance the way it’s set up right now.
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