Hear what an NFL Head Coach had to say about it
What up TOC Nation? We are just a couple of weeks from August and the beginning of our 2025 Football Preview Series. In the meantime, we are still doing our best to drum up articles. We have noticed the recent uptick in comments and I want to say we appreciate it, even if some of those comments are just to comment that there has been an uptick in comments.
Anyway, I am going to stir the pot a bit more on a topic that I am already tired of, but yet it is still in need of discussions. There was a quote from Tom Izzo a couple years ago with his criticisms of the transfer portal. His concerns were about the unintended effects that it would have for the student-athletes. Izzo worried that graduation rates would be diminished, that some players would not find new homes in the portal and then be left without a school, and, perhaps most importantly, that it simply is teaching the wrong lessons to these kids as they are getting ready for the adult world. He worried that the transfer portal was giving the player an easy way out, rather than having them work harder to earn playing time, if they are not getting the minutes they desire.
Let me tell you something: This transfer portal is not going to be the best thing for the kids…
You know what, what’s wrong with being unhappy? I’m unhappy most of my life. Unhappy drives you. Unhappy pushes you. Unhappy makes people realize, ‘You know what? I’m not good enough. I’ve got to get better.’
That quote was from back in 2023, but now there is another coach who is taking it even a step further and issuing college athletes a warning about why they should not transfer. Detroit Lions Head Coach Dan Campbell was recently the guest on a podcast and had this to say about how the Lions scouting department functions. [Editor’s note: you have to try hearing this in Dan Campbell’s voice and patterns of speech.]
This doesn’t look like it’s going my way. And I don’t think I’m gonna start. I’m just leaving, and then you go to the next place, and it just looks like it may not be going where you want to Okay, well then I’m going to leave that school too, or I’m leaving this spring to go somewhere else. Well, we don’t want those guys. I mean, you’re looking at guys that transfer two or three times. Like, to me, you’re scared of competition. So we just, I don’t want to say with every one of them, but we just get them off the board. It’s not worth it.
Coach Campbell did say that this is not a 100% rule and there are times when they do find it acceptable for a college athlete to transfer. He also did say that it gives their scouting team more work to do, so that could also be some of the motivation behind this quote. Regardless, this should come as a warning to college players that their decisions to switch schools when they are 20 years old could have an impact on their professional prospects a couple years later.
As for me, I am 100% behind this quote from Dan Campbell and I wish that more professional coaches, and executives, would come out and say this. What about you? If you were a professional coach or general manager, would you avoid players who had transferred back in college? What if you were a college coach? Would you feel apprehension toward taking a potential transferee because they did not want to try to fight for playing time at their first school? Comments section, go!