I sat there last night after the kids finally crashed, the house quiet except for the low hum of the fridge and my laptop screen glowing with that Alabama spring ball clip, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that the transfer portal just murdered the one thing I actually loved about college football quarterback rooms. The old-school battle. The months of “we’re letting the best man win” coachspeak that actually meant something. Now it’s all locked in by January like a bad casino deal where the house already knows the outcome.
I’ve been swinging and missing on columns lately, I’ll admit it. My Avalanche take from last week aged like milk after that collapse, and the Royals bullpen rant felt like I was yelling at clouds. But this one? This transfer portal thing with quarterbacks? I’m going all-in because it’s personal. I watched too many seasons where spring practices actually decided something real. Now every Power 4 program with a pulse is dropping two million on some veteran and calling it a “competition” when we all know it’s theater. My stomach actually tightened reading those numbers—two hundred FBS scholarship quarterbacks in the portal this January. Thirty-plus of them walking straight into Power 4 starting jobs next fall. That’s not roster building. That’s a hostile takeover.
Remember when I wrote that you can never have too much Tim Tebow? That was me romanticizing the idea of real competition, of a guy earning it in the room instead of getting paid to skip the line. I stand by it even more now. The portal and revenue sharing turned quarterback development into a transaction. Schools used to gamble on high school signees and let them battle through spring. Now they’re paying for experience the same way a front office in The Godfather pays for protection—except the protection here is a guy who already started thirty games somewhere else. Only sixteen of fifty-five Power 4 teams are rolling with a guy they signed out of high school. Let that sink in. Twenty-nine percent. The rest are imports.
I get why coaches are relieved. Steve Sarkisian straight-up said exit meetings felt better this year because nobody was threatening to leave for more money mid-spring. I don’t blame him. Who wants to negotiate against some other school’s NIL collective while trying to install a scheme? But that relief comes at a cost I can’t stop thinking about. When you invest that kind of rev-share money in one player, the decision is made before pads even hit the ground. No more genuine battles. Just a named starter and a bunch of expensive backups pretending they’re still in the mix for the cameras.
Look at Missouri. Eli Drinkwitz named Austin Simmons the guy weeks ago specifically so leadership could form over the summer. He admitted last year’s delay hurt them. Smart move on paper. But I keep coming back to what that actually means for the kid behind him. Is he developing or just collecting a check while waiting for the next portal window? Same story at Florida State. Mike Norvell has already anointed Auburn transfer Ashton Daniels even though Malachi Marshall is coming in from junior college. Why even bring Marshall if the race is over? It’s like casting a movie and announcing the lead before the table read.
The elimination of the spring portal sealed it. Quarterbacks had to decide in January whether staying to compete was worth the risk. Alberto Mendoza bailed on Georgia Tech before any real battle with Josh Hoover. Emory Williams left Miami while they were still hunting a big name. Gio Lopez, who started eleven games at North Carolina, chose Wake Forest over fighting Billy Edwards Jr. at Wisconsin. These aren’t fringe guys. These are decisions that used to play out in April under the lights with real stakes. Now they’re preemptive strikes.
I’m not naïve. I know the money changed everything. A two-million-dollar quarterback on a fifteen-million budget isn’t a luxury; he’s the plan. And once that plan is funded, coaches stop pretending there’s a race. The NCAA cracking down on post-spring ghost transfers just made the lock-in official. Everybody’s committed, including the depth chart. But here’s the part that’s eating at me: we’re losing the soap-opera drama that made college football different from the pros. In the NFL you expect veterans to walk in and start. In college we used to get the redemption arc, the walk-on who beats out the five-star, the true freshman who forces his way into the conversation during spring ball. Those stories are drying up.
I watched what happened at Tennessee and UCLA last year with that Nico Iamaleava swap and Bear Bachmeier lighting up BYU as a freshman. Those were portal moves that worked because the timing still allowed some chaos. Now the chaos window is slammed shut in January. The result is more stability on the surface but less actual growth underneath. How many of these “settled” rooms will actually produce a quarterback who develops beyond what he already was? I’m betting fewer than people think.
The dad in me sees it differently too. My oldest is starting to ask why every good college quarterback seems to come from somewhere else. I don’t have a clean answer. I used to tell him the best guy wins the job. Now I’m explaining revenue sharing and portal timing like it’s a business merger. That’s not the sport I fell in love with.
Coaches keep saying they want leadership to take hold early. Drinkwitz said it out loud. Norvell is already moving on. I get the logic. But I also remember what real competition used to do. It created buy-in from the entire room. It forced the starter to earn respect instead of inheriting it. When you pay a guy two million to be the guy, that respect has to be manufactured. And manufactured leadership rarely survives the first three-game skid.
I said it after the Avalanche series last week and I’ll say it again here: sometimes the swing that feels desperate is the only one worth taking. This portal era feels like we traded the possibility of magic for the guarantee of competence. I’m not convinced competence wins championships in college football the way we think it does. The teams that still let a real battle happen—Alabama included—are the ones I’m circling for September. Everybody else is just managing their investment.
The transfer portal didn’t kill every quarterback competition. But it killed the ones that used to matter most. And I’m not sure we’re getting them back.
