NCAA President Charlie Baker made an appearance on ESPN at the College World Series on Monday and discussed a few topics, including the transfer portal.

The portal has been very busy over the offseason with many players transferring and trying to find new college homes, and Baker gave an explanation for why he thinks transferring has become so commonplace in the current college athletics landscape.

Part of the reason, Baker said, is the COVID-19 pandemic that put on-campus recruiting visits on hold and caused a lot of student-athletes to make the wrong college choice “because they didn’t get to go to campus, and a lot of them just had a really crummy experience the first year or two.”

“Look, I think the portal – there’s a couple things about the portal we need to remember,” Baker said. “One is we have a lot of student-athletes going into the portal who have a fifth and sixth year of eligibility. … We also have the classes of ’24 and ’25 didn’t actually get to visit the school they had to choose. If you look at the numbers of students period at colleges who’ve been transferring for the past few years, the numbers are really high. The student-athlete numbers are actually lower as a percent of their total part of the population. But there’s a lot of movement that I think’s driven by the fact you had two years where most kids didn’t get a chance to visit a school before they had to choose where to go, which is complicated.”

Baker said almost half of the student-athletes who entered the portal last year didn’t end up with another school, and Baker attributes that to many of them going after NIL deals that didn’t come to fruition.

“I do think for student-athletes, this lack of any available real information about what’s going on other than the hearsay and the mythology and the misinformation that somebody feeds you is a problem,” Baker said. “In D1 last year, almost half the kids that went into the portal didn’t land anywhere. And I’m convinced that they were pulled into it by somebody who was just collecting names and trying to see if they could land them somewhere. If you could validate or verify when somebody says ‘you’re with X or I’ve done Y,’ I think that would make it a lot easier for families and student-athletes to make good decisions instead of what, for a lot of kids, turned out to be bad ones. So, yeah, the portal needs work, but I think there’s a lot of noise in it at the moment that’s due to COVID.”

–Photo courtesy of USA Today Sports Images 

We are excited to announce our second annual Dear Old Clemson event for the freshmen football class.  Come out on July 22 at 10 AM at the indoor football facility for a meet and greet autograph session with the scholarship freshmen from the 2023 class.  Clemson coordinators Garrett Riley and Wes Goodwin will be attendance and speak at the event.

Get your tickets today at Dear Old Clemson.