Thoughts on the NCAA Transfer Portal
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There are a lot of takes on the NCAA’s transfer portal. I promise this will be one of them. But I’m not interested in taking a stand for or against transfers or anything like that; this take will be lukewarm at best. In keeping with how I approach my job as a performance analyst, my comments are meant to shed light on what you’re seeing rather than to suggest courses of action.
Since the introduction of the portal and the change of rules regarding student-athlete eligibility around transfers, people seem surprised by the amount of movement they see. But I think people are missing opportunities to consider some pieces of the puzzle that significantly affect the likelihood of transfers.
The whole recruiting process is destined to take place in an environment that makes it difficult for prospective student-athletes (PSAs) and their families to get useful information. Families have limited access to NCAA bylaws while college coaches are regularly tested on those same bylaws. Further, the bylaws limit college coaches’ opportunities to talk with PSAs. The people with the best knowledge of the rules that govern recruiting (coaches) cannot spend much time talking to the other group of people that are subject to those bylaws (PSAs). Not to mention that those coaches are too busy selling their programs and institutions to educate families more than necessary about recruiting rules. I think there are good reasons for those contact limitations to be in place, but this is a consequence of the contact restrictions.
If this is the case, why should I expect anyone to be able to make reasonable decisions that will still be viewed as reasonable in a year’s time?
One conversation I found myself having repeatedly with colleagues at the AVCA convention last month was around how they were talking with potential transfers and incoming student-athletes. Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) and revenue sharing are now necessary parts of conversations with and considerations of student-athletes. NCAA Division I coaches began having conversations around money a few years ago, when the NCAA lost the Alston decision and when member institutions began offering money above and beyond the cost of attendance. And yet, the advent of NIL and now revenue sharing bring on financial discussions unlike those of previous years.
The coupling of NIL and revenue sharing with current transfer rules means that NCAA DI coaches are now having recruiting conversations that more closely resemble contract negotiations for professional athletes than the conversations they used to have. Given that almost no college coach has previous experience in such contract negotiations, I have an expectation that coaches, athletes, and families will be figuring out how to have those conversations for some time, especially considering that the landscape is far from settled. But, due to existing NCAA amateurism bylaws, there are no agents or others with negotiating experience supporting the student-athletes. So one side has no experience and no help in making decisions and the other side finds themselves with experience that no longer applies.
As I see it, recruiting conversations, at least in the near term, will be had by people who are currently under-equipped to have such conversations. They will have those conversations in the context of a continually-shifting environment in which power and knowledge are likely to be radically unequally distributed. Since things are likely to be continually shifting, it will be difficult to know if conversations can or should be the same from one institution to another and/or from one student-athlete to another.
The difficulties and incentives of the recruiting process make decision making difficult for all parties involved.
Again I ask the question, why should I expect anyone to be able to make reasonable decisions that will still be viewed as reasonable in a year’s time?
The changing of bylaws regarding transfers have highlighted the difficulty in making recruiting decisions for PSAs. But they have also highlighted how difficult it is to assess how a PSA will continue to develop. During the high school recruiting process, coaches evaluate PSAs (and PSAs evaluate themselves) while they compete against a wide mix of other players. Once those PSAs come to college, coaches and players can evaluate the players/themselves when playing against a much more consistent level of competition. The players are demonstrating their abilities to learn and compete in a different setting than they did in club and high school. These factors contribute to a better understanding of a college player’s abilities. More information allows for better, or at least different decisions, than those made during the initial recruiting process. Forget about the dynamics of a team’s depth chart, coaches and players are considering a player’s skill level relative to other players across the entire NCAA. Both coaches and players can then better assess where the players belong in terms of their abilities.
With this increase in available information, why should I be surprised when coaches and players make different decisions than they made under lower-information conditions?
The last two factors I see affecting people’s perceptions of the frequency of transfers are less about decision making and more about statistics.
The first factor is the easing of restrictions on transfer eligibility in recent years. When penalties for transfers became less onerous, there was likely to be an increase in transfers, not because more players wanted to transfer than before, but because the incentives around the same player sentiments had changed. Think of the situation like when medical organizations change how diagnoses of the same ailments are determined. Changing the criteria doesn’t change the number of people affected by the ailment, it changes the way the accounting of those people is done. There is no way to count the number of players that wanted to transfer but didn’t because of eligibility concerns but changing restrictions allowed players in that category to express their desires in a noticeable way.
The second factor is a combination of the anchoring effect and base rate neglect. Sports fans in North America are used to seeing professional players in other sports become free agents and move from one team to another since 1972 so they have an expectation of how often they will see free agent signings in any given year. Without realizing it, they anchor to some number of signings they think is reasonable in a given year. But they don’t know what that base rate is.
In the North American “Big 3”“ leagues, there are 30 MLB teams, 32 NFL teams, and 30 NBA teams. If you keep counting bigger pro league teams, there are 32 NHL teams and 29 MLS teams. That’s a total of 153 pro teams in commonly-considered US leagues. In NCAA Women’s Division I Volleyball alone, there are over 330 teams. But people are hearing about transfers across more than just a single NCAA sport or division so that number goes up substantially. That increase in number of teams and athletes that can change teams shifts the number of changes people should expect but people aren’t equipped to recalibrate their expectations to account for that shift. Even if the base rate, which they don’t know, remains the same, the actual number of observed transfers changes and they don’t have the information to reassess what new number they should expect.
Having more information can often help people make better decisions. But, even if prospective student-athletes make the best decisions they can in choosing a program, the rapidly changing landscape of collegiate athletics means that there may be new and better decisions available to them in a year’s time.
All of this is to say that maybe there are more interesting and informative conversations to be had about the transfer portal than some version of “kids today” or “it’s the wild west”. Making recruiting and transfer decisions is hard for all parties. The rapidly-changing conditions in which those decisions are being made aren’t making those decisions easier. Maybe people would be better off if they tried to understand what’s leading to those decisions instead of just judging them so quickly.