The Transfer Portal: In The Middle

Right now, we’re in a kind of gray area in the college athletics calendar. Winter sports have wrapped up. Spring sports are in full swing. And fall sports are deep into their off-season routines. It’s also a time when the transfer portal becomes especially active—and once again, the conversations about it flare up.

Over the past few years, the transfer portal has become something of a wild, wild west. Years ago, transferring from one college to another was a lot less common, and definitely not as streamlined as it is today. Back then, athletes transferred if they were deeply unhappy—maybe with their coach, playing time, or school environment. But now, with the rise of the portal, transferring has become far more common. The numbers have skyrocketed.

What got me thinking more deeply about it today was watching a transfer announcement—an athlete moving from the University of Wyoming to the University of Minnesota. And it hit me: there’s a lot of judgment thrown at athletes who transfer. Some people really look down on it.

I get it. On the surface, it can seem strange to see an athlete transfer multiple times—sometimes every single year of college. I’ve seen athletes play for five different teams in five years. That raises questions. How do academic credits even transfer in that situation? Is that sustainable? And sure, some people abuse the system. Some use the portal as an easy out when things get tough. The critics say, “Kids these days are soft. They quit the moment adversity hits.” There’s probably some truth to that, at least in certain cases.

But on the flip side, I’ve also heard compelling arguments in favor of the portal. Some say it’s empowering—that it gives athletes agency. And when I think about it, that’s also true.

People change jobs all the time. They leave workplaces because of bad bosses, limited growth, or toxic environments. We switch grocery stores because one has better deals on the things we buy most often—or because it’s simply more convenient. We change the brand of pizza we order because we like the crust better, or the price, or the delivery time.

We switch cable or Wi-Fi providers due to rising costs, poor service, or better deals from the competition.

We make changes cconstantly. So why is it that when a college athlete transfers, people treat it like a scandal?

I think the truth, like in many things, lies somewhere in the middle.

Not every transfer is good. Not every transfer is bad. And most of the time, we have no idea why someone transferred. Maybe a coach changed. Maybe someone experienced something difficult behind the scenes. Or maybe they just needed a fresh start. Even someone who stays at the same school all four years may have wanted to leave but felt they couldn’t. We don’t always know what’s going on in someone’s life.

The problem is that we live in a society obsessed with binary thinking. Everything is either right or wrong, black or white, good or bad. That kind of polarization stems from the rise of scholasticism and rigid reasoning that developed in Western Europe—a mindset that still shapes how we think today in the U.S., whether we realize it or not.

But life isn’t always so simple. The truth is often broader. It exists in the gray areas, in the middle. And that’s where the transfer portal debate belongs, too. It doesn’t need to be polarizing. It doesn’t have to be all-or-nothing. It’s a case-by-case thing.

And maybe if we approached it that way, we’d be a little more compassionate, a little more open-minded, and a lot closer to the truth.