A college transfer portal has been in place since 2018. According to NFL coaches, this is having an increasing impact on the quality of talent.

Since mid-2021, college players have been allowed to earn money through the rights to their own name, image and brand.

These new earning opportunities give players a greater incentive to transfer colleges. Since 2018, there has been an internal transfer portal for this purpose.

Some anonymous NFL coaches emphasized to “The Athletic” how this negatively affects players’ draft chances. One wide receiver coach was particularly harsh on the new practice.

Receiver coach on college transfer portal: “It’s just a bad deal”:

“With all these guys transferring, I’m realizing now that transferring is starting to have an impact on the NFL because these kids are clowns,” the receiver coach said. “The colleges don’t know who they’re getting because the transfer portal process is like a 10-day speed dating thing.”

And further, “You don’t know who the kid is, and you can’t ask his previous college because you’re snatching him away from them. So you bring some of these guys to your school, and they’re a bust. The colleges they play for that one year don’t care because they got what they needed from them, and then they’re gone. It’s just a bad deal.”

The receivers coach cites the Ohio State Buckeyes as an exception: “Ohio State has been lucky so far because they haven’t been involved in this transfer fiasco. The top talent they have is still coming from their own culture. These other guys, no matter what college they’re from, Texas or Miami or wherever, they’re not really from there because they were only there for one season.”

NFL: Transfer portal also has a physical impact on talent

The portal is also said to have a physical impact on players. One defensive line coach noted that “the players aren’t being trained in the weight room like they used to be.”

“It’s about development, about building their fundamentals,” he said. “We really can’t do that anymore because so many players are transferring, going to two or three colleges. Plus, we’re afraid to train the guys and push them too hard because they’ll go to the portal. They go to all these different places and don’t have a foundation in the fundamentals. We’re not getting the same solid foundation in players that we did ten years ago, not even five years ago.”

Written by Michael