Blade on Portal

 Interesting story from The Blade on the transfer portal and Coach Loeffler's thoughts about it.

You should check it out.

A couple thoughts.

First, there's going to be a lot of disappointment for players in the portal.  If the numbers in the article are accurate and there are 2,500 players in the portal and possibly one vacancy per D1 team, then you have 90% of the players for whom there is no D1 slot.

Some teams have more available.  Still, the demand is not close to the supply.

Which brings Coach back to something he has talked about before, which is the issue of initial counters.  So long as there is a hard 25 counter limit, players are not going to have the freedom to move that was envisioned by the loosening of the transfer rules.  (For an explanation of this counter thing that is as good as I have seen, click here.)

This is why you see players transferring to DII schools.  You know, if you weren't playing I could see doing that but if you are playing, I don't get it.  But people get to make their own decisions.

Obviously, the weaknesses to the initial counter rule are especially difficult for a program like BG's, where people leaving the program as expected has been greatly exacerbated by people leaving before their time was up.  It is hard to catch up when you are limited to 25 a year.

Now, you could argue that the current rules favor teams that don't have recruiting classes hollowing out like BG did, and that's not anything that was forced on BG but rather the result of a couple poor coaching decisions...or a bad one and an awful one.  Decisions have consequences.

One idea is that you could replace people who left in the portal and have those not count against your...well...counters.  

Based on history, the NCAA will address this in 2028, or, possibly, never, if the P5 schools create a new organization for football.

The other news is kind of snuck into the story.  BG has 3 scholarships left and is planning to use them for people in the portal.  As you are all aware, Coach Loeffler has taken a strong stand against transfer and JUCO players in rebuilding the program.  I believe that in his late-season post-Akron rant press conference, he said that he needed to build a culture and once you did you could bring in a few transfers but until there was a culture it didn't make any sense to bring in individual players.

This is at best a slight change in philosophy.  There are still teams using way more transfers than BG is.  However, I do think it makes sense to get someone who can help us next year and the year after (he says they are looking for multi-year eligibility, not grad transfers) because there are a couple positions--WR in particular--where we desperately need numbers...or 2021 is shaping up to be another awful year.  (It will be difficult under any circumstances, I fear).