3 months have passed since the NFL Draft and the college football fan in me is still left with a bad taste in his mouth. While college football has always had its “haves” and “have nots” , NIL and the transfer portal have greatly deepened the divide.
Jahmyr Gibbs was the #12 overall pick in the draft. He fled a losing Georgia Tech team to be the feature back at Alabama.
Vanderbilt had a decent offensive lineman in Tyler Steen. He fled Nashville for the Crimson TIde and became the #65 overall pick in the draft.
Before Tennessee had its renaissance 2022, linebacker Henry To’oTo’O transferred to, you guessed it, Alabama. To’oTo’O was a 5th round draft pick.
Does it help college football that Nick Saban gets to cherry pick from lesser squads? Like Alabama really needs the help after each year’s premier recruiting class!!
This is not just an “Alabama” thing. The MAC has become a de facto farm club for the Power 5. Kent State’s best 2 offensive players said adieu. QB Collin Schlee transferred to UCLA while his primary receiver, Dante Cephas, left for Happy Valley. Ball State’s Carson Steele was probably the MAC’s best back in 2022, as he rushed for 1,556 yards. The Indiana prep will be Schlee’s running mate in Westwood in 2023.
The Odyssey is torn. Some transfers are more than understandable (One can totally understand why Charles Jones’ ditched Iowa’s staid offense for pass happy Purdue. He had a much better 2022 in West Lafayette than he ever would have had in Iowa City). However, some of the transfers are thumbing their nose at the teams that believed in them coming out of high school. This scent of disloyalty does bother the Odyssey.
We are also concerned about the fan experience. If the “have” versus “have not” divide continues to widen, fans will be subject to more blowout games. In Ann Arbor, among other college football palaces, fans will be paying lots of money for a second straight season of paying for laughable non-conference sacrifices (The Wolverines’ non-conference victims in 2022: Hawaii, Colorado State and Connecticut; 2023: East Carolina, UNLV and Bowling Green).
Unless the transfer portal gets tightened, maybe the only solution is to have one or two elite conferences whose schedules consist solely of playing each other. For other teams, the Odyssey would be very open to a promotion/relegation approach now employed by Britain’s Premier League.
The Odyssey would generally prefer a return to the “old days” but that horse has left the barn. Let’s hope the powers that be will be able to limit the damage.
