NASHVILLE — NCAA president Charlie Baker believes there’s time to figure out the transfer portal window situation after FBS coaches voted Tuesday to significantly cut down the days available to transfer.
Announced at the AFCA convention earlier Tuesday in Charlotte, the football coaches unanimously voted to eliminate the December and April transfer portal windows in favor of a 10-day transfer portal window from Jan. 2-12. It would eliminate 20 days of transfer availability after the NCAA Division I Council already shortened the windows from 45 days down to 30 last year.
Baker, speaking to a small group of reporters at the NCAA convention a few hundred miles to the west, says the coaches’ proposal will be examined but offered a reminder why there may not be as simple a solution as the coaches want.
“I think the transfer windows are challenging in part because we need to build them around an academic calendar,” Baker said. “Everybody’s still going to college, one percent maybe will play pro. It’s really important that we not lose sight of that. I get the fact that it’s a challenging calendar as it is, and I fully expect that that will get thoroughly vetted as it should, by the appropriate committees, but they’ve got time to figure that one out.”
The current transfer portal windows have elicited significant frustration from college coaches burnt out from trying to keep up with seemingly non-stop recruiting while their seasons are still going on. Only in college sports does free agency — which is what the transfer portal window is at this point — happen while the playoffs have yet to finish. Penn State backup quarterback Beau Pribula jumping into the transfer portal while the Nittany Lions were still competing for a national championship illustrated the issues with the current setup.
But beyond the valid academic calendar issues that add an extra hurdle is the inherent bureaucratic challenge of trying to get real change actually passed. The FBS coaches voting to endorse the proposal is just one step in the process. It will still need approval from the football oversight committee and if it gets approved out of that committee it will still need approval from the Division I Council which includes at least one representative from all 32 Division 1 conferences.
Power Four conferences, including the Southeastern Conference, have previously pushed hard to scrap the spring transfer portal window, according to sources, to no success. What the power conferences want doesn’t always align with the rest of the NCAA Division I, a sore topic at the heart of the Power Four wanting more control and power over the governance model.
The Power Four conferences recently submitted a proposal, as first reported by Yahoo Sports, that would allow for them to take greater control over rules, proposals and even, potentially, national championships. It is unclear if it will garner enough support to be approved with Baker saying, “We get a bunch of submissions from all kinds of people that we asked for .. that’s one of the ones that got submitted.
One thing that proposal makes clear, however, is that the NCAA’s governance structure will continue to be a hot topic as powerful leaders look to wrest more control away from their smaller counterparts.
“I think that there’s a lot of agreement that we’ve got to restructure how we do decision making in Division I,” said Baylor president Linda Livingstone, who serves as the chair of the powerful NCAA Board of Governors. “Even though the autonomy conference already has some level of autonomy, that there’s probably another iteration of that, given that we’re going to have a set of schools, particularly those in the autonomy conferences, that are really investing more resources at a very significant level.
“And that because of that there are going to be some decisions they want to make that might be unique to that set of schools that are participating in that level.”
