College Football has always been crazy as it has provided some of the best upsets in sports history. For example, September 1, 2007 an FCS Appalachian State traveled to Ann Arbor to play number five Michigan and pulled off one of the best and most significant upsets in sports history. In 2022 and looking forward to 2023 a major aspect of craziness has come through the transfer portal which provides athletes to change their school and team.

For a long time the rules around transferring in college football would require players to sit out a year and many did it as freshman and sophmores rather than juniors and seniors. It was also common with players who were injured as they may have lost their spot and were granted an extra year of eligibility to play college football because of it so the waiting out wasn’t as big of a deal. Between Covid-19 pandemic and the new NIL deals in college football this has changed.

The Covid-19 pandemic caused the 2020 college football season to either be canceled or very limited depending on the conference schools were in. This caused thousands of players across the country to be granted extra years of eligibility to play college football and so many since 2020 have transferred to new schools using those extra years to hopefully become starters and better players.

NIL stands for name, image, and likeness which is new for all NCAA sports which allows players to make money from outside businesses which set a precedent for college athletes to make money. Up until the passing of NIL students being paid as athletes in college was strictly prohibited. An extreme example of this was Reggie Bush who in 2005 had his Heisman trophy taken away due to the University of Southern California paying him money to play for them. Today, in college football NIL is a significant factor for college football players transferring as they want to earn as much money based on their name in college as few players end up making a living in either the NFL or another professional football league.

2022 and 2023 will set record numbers of players transferring as 2,247 players have entered the transfer portal and until today December 5th only graduate transfers were officially allowed to enter the portal. Now until the spring the portal will be open for more and more players to hopefully transfer to new schools as many unfortunately do not find new schools to attend.