There are no winners when the NCAA transfer window opens.
Sure, hundreds and hundreds of college football players are rewarded with new offers and opportunities. But their recruitments are just getting started. Nobody becomes the Portal King on Day 1. If you ask the staff members in recruiting departments whose entire Monday was just consumed by the portal, they say success is defined a little differently on the first day that underclassmen can officially transfer. If they didn’t unexpectedly lose any players they hoped to keep, it was a good day.
“It’s more terrifying than exciting,” a Power 5 recruiting staffer said.
The dizzying first day of the winter transfer window brought a record-setting amount of roster attrition for teams throughout the sport. It’s time to dig into the numbers, names and trends from the most important day of the 2023-24 transfer cycle.
Take that for data
A total of 538 FBS scholarship players put their name in the NCAA transfer portal on Monday. That’s an 18 percent increase from last year’s opening day of portal activity. But that group of players — 305 from Power 5 programs, 233 from the Group of 5 — doesn’t come close to measuring the magnitude on Monday.
Because there were also nearly 100 walk-ons who entered the portal. And there were a whopping 416 players from FCS schools who also opted to transfer. Last year, the FCS transfer window opened two weeks earlier than the FBS window. This gave college football coaches more time to evaluate those lower-level players before the more coveted transfers hit the market. This year? The portal opened on the same day for both subdivisions.
Add up every college football player who appeared in the transfer portal over the course of Monday, and you get a grand total of 1,127. That represents a 44 percent increase from the previous record-setting day of 780 entries on Dec. 5, 2022.
In the next few days, the number of FBS scholarship players available in the transfer portal will surpass 1,000. How packed is the transfer portal after all of Monday’s entries? Here’s a breakdown of the 901 uncommitted scholarship players by position:
Quarterbacks: 86
Running backs: 78
Wide receivers: 152
Tight ends: 51
Offensive linemen: 137
Defensive linemen: 106
Linebackers: 103
Defensive backs: 177
Specialists: 25
