TCU has a ‘Stanford problem’ when it comes to the NCAA’s busy transfer portal
As major college athletics continues to look, and sometimes function, professional it’s not just Stanford University as the lone tree standing in the middle of a typhoon.
Every private university from USC to TCU to Wake Forest to Duke that plays ball at the highest levels is figuring out how to update its long standing policies on a variety of issues to accommodate the NCAA’s new guidelines, including specifically transfers, while retaining its academic reputation.
TCU begins its 2024 football season on Friday night in Palo Alto, Calif. against Stanford, and both are in the same spot about this issue, but moving at different speeds as they try keep pace, and not lose out, in the widening world of the transfer portal.
Stanford’s entire football roster features nine undergraduate transfers. TCU’s recruiting class for the 2024 season featured nine undergrad transfers.
In this current era not only of athletics but higher education where students are more nomadic, the transfer policies are being addressed by most private schools. The policies and attitude are one of the reasons why David Shaw left as the head coach at Stanford after the 2022 season.
“What I didn’t know until we started the season was how much the transfer portal had really bolstered our competition,” Shaw told the media when he announced he was resigning after the 2022 season. “The ability in college football right now to put together an All-Star Team is daunting.”
When Shaw left and Stanford interviewed potential successors, including former Dallas Cowboys head coach Jason Garrett, one of the topics of concern among the candidates was the school’s attitude towards the transfer portal. The policy is one of the reasons why candidates steered clear of the job.
The last time Stanford had a winning season was 2018.
Not coincidentally, in 2018 the NCAA created the “Transfer Portal” to allow for an easier way for college student athletes, and coaches, to monitor what is available. It radically changed NCAA sports, to the point where it’s become a two-way street of players, and increasingly schools and coaches, moving on from each other with no hesitation.
Former TCU football coach Gary Patterson was famously uneasy about this development; he had a nickname for the moms and dads of a player who threatened to leave, “Portal Parents.”
His successor, Sonny Dykes, was receptive to accepting transfers when he was at SMU, a strength when TCU vetted candidates to succeed Patterson. Dykes’ approach to recruit transfers hasn’t changed; what has changed is the amount of students looking to transfer, and the headaches that come with it.
TCU coaches are more apt to embrace the transfer portal like any of their competitors.
“We want to build from the high schools, so when we look at the portal we want to use it to fill gaps,” Texas Tech football coach Joey McGuire said in an interview earlier this year. “We are looking for an older kid who has played a lot of football. We would love to have a graduate student. Three of (Texas Tech’s) four offensive linemen have all graduated.”
McGuire’s stance on this is a common approach.
The athlete-student can now transfer multiple times, and is eligible to play immediately. For nearly all of the public, state schools that participate in this process, juggling all of this is not seamless, but doable. For the private school that is recruiting the same player, against those public schools, the transfer process can be complicated.
Private schools, like TCU, Northwestern and the rest, typically want to protect the value of the “four-year college experience.” These schools usually only allow a limited number of credit hours to transfer towards a degree at their school. It’s a way for the private school to prevent a student to earn what is normally an expensive diploma at a fraction of the cost.
The potential transfer may also find their credit hours don’t align with their preferred major, giving them another reason to pause about going to that school. It’s common to find the student who has transferred to the private school will “lose” credit hours in their effort to complete a degree at the new university.
As sports-minded as the student athlete is at the Division I level, they do not want to lose credit hours towards graduation. They don’t want to lose anything towards becoming eligible as a “grad transfer,” which allows them to move to another school and play a fifth season.
This is not just an athletics issue. This current generation of college student is more nomadic, and cost aware, than ever before. For a lot of schools, the transfer student is becoming the best way to boost the diversity of the student population.
The challenge for a Stanford, a TCU, Northwestern or a Duke is how best to accommodate these students while remaining competitive at the highest level of NCAA sports and retaining the value of their expensive four-year degrees.
