On Tuesday, the NCAA Division I Committee decided to vote to shorten the college football and basketball transfer portal window. With the recent approval, the change will take effect starting this cycle and will impact the upcoming winter window.
For the past two years, the transfer portal was first 60 days, then 45 days, and now 30 days.
For basketball, players can start putting their names in the transfer portal starting in the second round of the NCAA Tournament. The portal will close before the end of April. The NCAA will still allow a 30-day window for athletes to transfer if the head coach leaves.
As for college football, athletes will now have a 20-day window in the winter and then another 10 days starting in the spring. The current dates for the winter and spring are set from December 9 to December 28 and then April 16 to 25.
Along with that, all sports will have an additional 30-day notification of a transfer window for student-athletes the day after the departure of the head coach is announced.
Another option the D-I Council is considering in the future is eliminating the spring transfer portal.
During the 2023-2024 school year, more than 2,800 FBS scholarship players put their names into the NCAA’s transfer database. After players withdrew or went pro, the final number was 2,707 transfers, which means roughly 25% of all FBS scholarship players hit the transfer portal in one year.
As for some of the conferences, the ACC, SEC, Big Ten, and Big 12, plus the American Football Coaches Association, were all in support of eliminating the 15-day spring portal. The reasoning behind the decision to limit the number of days athletes can transfer would be directly tied to power conferences being able to stabilize and take control of roster movement and construction.
The NCAA has also been inside the courtroom on multiple topics, but one has been the transfer portal window, where new legislation was passed this spring allowing multi-time transfers to enter the portal and play immediately. Also, coming soon will be teams having roster limits, which will be set to begin in college football as soon as the House v. NCAA settlement is certified.
Currently, teams can have 85 scholarship players, but with walk-ons counted, some teams can hover around 120. With the settlement set to take place, teams will only have a roster limit of 105, which are scholarship athletes.
