Has the transfer portal killed junior college recruiting? Someone had taken my scholarship

Written by Grace Raynor, Manny Navarro and Sam Khan Jr. 

Major Williams seemed on the verge of returning to the Power 5 ranks after a successful spring 2021 season at Iowa Central Community College.

The cornerback from Florida originally signed with Virginia as a three-star prospect in the Class of 2019. And, after a detour to junior college, he was once again in demand, ranked No. 25 among junior college recruits by 247Sports.

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That’s when the “amazing journey,” as Williams calls it, took some interesting turns.

Tennessee and Utah offered but ended up backing off when they landed transfers.

Disappointed, Williams committed to Youngstown State, a highly successful FCS program that won four national titles in the 1990s with Jim Tressel as coach.

“Then I got a call two days before signing day saying I couldn’t sign anymore because someone else had taken my scholarship,” Williams said. “It hit me hard.”

Williams ended up signing in February 2022 with Carson-Newman, a Division II school in Jefferson City, Tenn.

So how does a prospect slip that far down the college football food chain, so close to playing in the SEC or Pac-12 only to end up without an offer from a Division I program?

You can blame, in part, the transfer portal, which is making it more difficult for junior college transfers to find a coveted spot at a Power 5 program.

The numbers tell the story. In 2018, 129 juco football players signed with Power 5 schools, according to 247Sports’ database. In 2021, that number bottomed out at 45. This cycle, 58 juco recruits signed with Power 5 schools through the February signing period, per 247.

Power 5 signees from junior college

That total may be an underestimate. A comprehensive analysis by TCU recruiting intern Trevor Reed found at least 65 juco players committed to Power 5 programs in the current cycle, but that’s still nearly a 50 percent dip in jucos going Power 5 from the pre-portal era.

“I’m not gonna say I was scared of the portal, but I was kind of like, ‘OK if they go out and try to get somebody else, obviously they’re gonna take that person because they’ve been in a Division I program and they know about all that stuff,’” said Tysheik Galloway, a defensive lineman from Coffeyville (Kan.) Community College who signed with Liberty in December.

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“But it is what it is.”

So why the shift?

Coaches cite a better feel for the level of competition an FBS, or even FCS, transfer has faced compared to junior college recruits. Academic eligibility is more cut-and-dried with portal players (if a player was academically eligible at his previous FBS program, then he’s likely good to go wherever he lands), whereas a junior college player usually requires a deeper transcript assessment.

If a player has been eating and working out in an FBS program, he may be more physically developed than a junior college player who doesn’t have access to the same amenities. And as the portal has popularized, more scouting resources have been dedicated to it than junior college recruiting.

“It definitely takes more time,” said Tyler Olker, TCU’s director of player personnel.

The most important factor, however, is immediate eligibility. The portal launched in October 2018, but the number of transfers didn’t significantly increase until the NCAA started freely granting waivers (to non-graduates) that allowed athletes to play right away. Then, the floodgates opened in April 2021 when the NCAA officially changed its transfer rule.

A transfer who no longer had to sit out a season became exponentially more attractive on the open market. And the repercussions have been felt at junior college programs around the country.

Scott Strohmeier has been the head coach at Iowa Western Community College for all 14 seasons of the program’s existence. He won national championships in 2012 and 2022 and has sent about 250 players to the Division I level, including 85-plus to the Power 5 ranks.

And yet during the 2021 season:

“I had a defensive player of the year in junior college who had one Division I offer, from Iowa State, and that was late,” Strohmeier said of now-Cyclones linebacker Jacob Ellis. “In years past — shoot, he would have double-digit (offers).”

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Part of the juco conundrum over the past couple of seasons, Strohmeier said, has been the extra year of eligibility that players on 2020 rosters received because of the COVID-19 pandemic. FBS rosters have been more crowded than usual, which has created fewer opportunities for his players looking to land one of the 85 spots.

That part of the equation improved this year, he said. But he believes junior college players are still getting left behind — in large part because of the portal and coaches’ perception that they have better options already playing at the FCS or FBS level. There have been occasions when coaches have even told Strohmeier on their visits to Iowa Western that their next flights are to visit portal prospects. Coaches simply aren’t spending as much time scouting junior college players.

“If you’re a corner and all of a sudden this kid who played in eight games at Alabama — and you’re a junior college kid — and the Alabama kid enters the portal, he played in the SEC for eight games,” Strohmeier said. “That’s gonna weigh a little bit more than the kid who’s coming out of a junior college. And so they’re gonna take him.”

Strohmeier said that in order to navigate the challenges of the portal, he now advises his players to consider an offer as soon as it comes in. His former quarterback Nate Glantz, the NJCAA Offensive Player of the Year in the spring 2021 season, had an offer from a Group of 5 program he intended to take. The program visited Glantz on campus and met with his family, as well. But when Glantz called to commit, the program had bad news: It had just taken a transfer out of the portal the day before and was pulling its scholarship offer. Glantz ended up as a preferred walk-on at Iowa State and has since transferred to McNeese.

So this year, when linebacker Rashion Hodge came to Strohmeier for guidance about an offer from Western Kentucky, the coach offered some simple advice: “I’m like, ‘You’re not waiting for another one. You’ve got to go on a visit, and if you like it, you’ve got to take it,’” Strohmeier said. “You don’t know what’s going to happen.”

Hodge visited Western Kentucky on Jan. 6 and 7. He committed on Jan. 8 and signed last month.

Mark Duda has been at Lackawanna College in Pennsylvania since 1993 and has been the head coach since 1994. He’s the winningest active junior college coach, with a record of 199-93, and led Lackawanna to a national title game appearance in 2019.

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He said at its best Lackawanna would send “between five to six guys to Power 5 programs and another eight or nine to Group of 5 schools. Now, you get two to three Power 5 guys and more of them going G5.”

“We’re still viable. It’s just now you have to be the upper, upper, upper guy in order to be a Power 5 recruit,” Duda said. “We haven’t had offers pulled, but they’ve been offered later (in the recruiting process). It’s not like it was before — coming in and getting an offer right away. It’s more of a wait-and-see situation if a portal guy is coming to them or not.”

Last year, Lackawanna sent three players to Power 5 programs: offensive tackle JB Nelson (Penn State), safety Tyrece Mills (Penn State) and receiver Colbie Young (Miami).

In 2021, cornerback DeJahn Warren — ranked No. 4 among junior college players in the 247Sports rankings — signed with Jackson State. In 2020, four players from Lackawanna signed with P5 programs, including Penn State safety Ji’Ayir Brown, who was the co-MVP of the Rose Bowl.

There hasn’t been a drop-off in top-level junior college talent, Duda said. FBS programs are simply looking at the transfer portal first.

“The Colbie Youngs, those kinds of kids, are still as valuable today as they were before,” Duda said. “The timeline for them hasn’t changed. They’ll sign in December.

“The project guy, who is a little bit underneath as far as talent level, has to wait longer. He’ll sign in the summer. A midyear guy from JC used to be super valuable. Now, not so much. FBS programs will go portal first, and the guys who graduate from us in May are actually in a better position (to find a spot late). That has flipped because of the portal.

“The JC guy who needs a year to redshirt, he gets passed on.”

Dana Dimel has always believed in junior colleges. He came from one, playing at Hutchinson (Kan.) Community College before transferring to Kansas State in 1984. He worked on staff under K-State legend Bill Snyder, who cornered the market on juco prospects to great success.

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That’s why, when Dimel took over as UTEP’s head coach in December 2017, his first priority was tapping the junior colleges.

There was one problem, though — the majority of the top players were signing with Power 5 programs.

“I remember looking at the juco talent pool and going, ‘Oh my gosh, there’s just not very many good players out there,’” Dimel recalled this week. “And we were just desperately trying to find some good junior college talent.”

Before the portal and one-time transfer rule existed, new coaches would often turn to junior colleges to find instant-impact talent to accelerate a rebuild. The landscape was much more competitive as Power 5 programs stocked up on juco recruits.

Now, with Power 5 programs viewing Group of 5 and FCS schools as their de facto junior college market, quality juco talent is filtering more to Group of 5 programs. According to Reed’s analysis at TCU, at least 242 junior college recruits committed to G5 programs, more than triple the number that signed with Power 5 schools (and there are roughly the same number of G5 and P5 schools in the FBS). That total is slightly higher than it was in 2018, when 237 committed to Group of 5 schools, per 247.

Dimel signed 24 jucos in UTEP’s 39-member 2023 class, making up 61 percent of the signees. And though the total number of jucos going G5 is similar to five years ago, the dip in Power 5 juco recruiting makes a higher-level prospect attainable to the G5s today.

“The talent out there is crazy,” Dimel said. “It has changed dramatically in the five years that I’ve been here.”

Added Strohmeier: “The Group of 5s, I think (this) is the best time to be recruiting junior colleges right now. Because there’s guys that they’re able to get that in years’ past they probably wouldn’t be able to get.”

Most juco signees, P5 programs, 2018-2023

Whether it’s simply finding information or diagnosing a transcript, junior college recruiting requires more legwork than the portal. Dimel said he and his staff rely on an old-fashioned recruiting staple: personal relationships. Because he has recruited junior colleges for so long, there’s an inherent trust with coaches at that level.

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“We rely on that more than the recruiting services,” Dimel said. “We’ve been doing it for so long. (Junior college) coaches will tell you ‘Hey, Dana, this guy can do it.’”

Buddy Stephens, the head coach at East Mississippi and most known for his time on Netflix’s “Last Chance U,” subscribes to the philosophy that Power 5-caliber players still receive Power 5 offers.

“I mean, we had Elijah Davis this year, and I think he was rated in some places (as) the No. 1 defensive tackle coming out,” Stephens said of the now-South Carolina signee. “He had Alabama, Tennessee, South Carolina, Georgia — he still had the offers.”

But Galloway, the Liberty signee, was the first to admit that had he not been a defensive lineman, he might have struggled.

“To some people, (the portal) did mess them up,” he said. “But defensive line is always a position of need.”

Galloway said that after he committed to Liberty, several Power 5 defensive line coaches or recruiting coordinators started to “like” some of his content on social media in what he perceived to be an effort to gauge how locked in he was with the Flames. The line of communication was never formally opened, but he could tell he felt like fallback option for these schools.

Bishop Fitzgerald, a fellow Coffeyville alum who has since signed with NC State, said Arizona State — which signed 26 portal prospects — similarly put him on the back burner.

“They kind of went ghost on me for about a month,” he said. “And after they didn’t get who they wanted, they kind of came back in the picture and wanted me to take a visit.

“At the end of the day, it’s a business deal. … But I kind of did feel a little validated.”

Sometimes it just takes some patience.

Through December, Elijah Philippe was the top unsigned junior college player in the 2023 cycle according to 247Sports. The 6-foot-7, 300-pound offensive lineman out of Lackawanna was working as a DoorDash delivery man while searching for a place to play. He had offers from Virginia Tech, South Carolina, Florida State, Auburn, UCF, Louisville, Washington State and Maryland among others before coaching changes across college football changed his outlook.

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Bryan Harsin wanted him but was fired at Auburn, and the Tigers instead took transfers from Western Kentucky, Tulsa, and East Carolina. Maryland, where Philippe visited twice, signed three linemen, including LSU transfer Marcus Dumervil. FSU signed three FBS offensive linemen in the portal. South Carolina, where he visited twice, had a change at offensive coordinator and signed two transfers from FCS programs.

It worked out in the end: Philippe signed with Troy last Wednesday after a late official visit to the Sun Belt School.

Philippe said the worst part is being “ghosted” by coaches who stop calling with no explanation.

“It definitely messes with you mentally,” Philippe said.

The portal isn’t all negative, though, Stephens said. It has its perks.

For one, jucos are getting more qualifiers out of high schools than before. It also helps identify who might be unhappy at the college ranks — and who’s available.

“Community colleges get that (portal) list and you’re able to keep an eye on these people. If it gets to be summer and this guy hasn’t found his place, hey you pick up the phone and call him,” Stephens said. “It used to be you had to find out through the grapevine, ‘Hey so and so is leaving so and so university.’

“Don’t let everybody tell you it’s all bad.”

Dimel has fond memories of his days at Hutchinson, a place where he met some of his best friends and “learned to fight and claw for everything that I had.” Even though junior college recruiting is enduring challenges now, he believes there will always be a place for it in college football.

“It’s a great opportunity for guys who didn’t have the opportunity coming out of high school for whatever reason,” Dimel said. “Jucos are a wonderful tool and a great avenue for guys.”

“I think that will sustain the test of time.”

(Illustration: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic; Photos: Courtesy of Elijah Philippe and Major Williams, Travis Jacobson / Iowa Western Athletics)

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