Transferring is thing in 2024, whether you like it or not, and athletes are more mobile than ever before. But don’t get tripped up.

In years past you wouldn’t jump to transfer since you needed to either have missed a year to injury or you had to sit out a year and lose a year of eligibility.

But, today, it’ll probably be common in a couple years to not see a D1 student-athlete transferring multiple times on their resumes.

Going into college, however, there are some things you should be aware of if you’re going to consider transferring which will be the topic of today’s Wednesday Workshop:

You get 5 years to be on a team, and 4 years to be on the field-ish. I say “ish” because at D1 programs you can be a freshmen and play up to four games without burning a year of your eligibility.

DI programs have consecutive running clocks. That means your five year eligibility clock starts the moment you enroll into your first post-secondary institution, anywhere.

This is true of international players too, or of attending community colleges with no football programs too. The reason why you see 95 year old Aussies (just kidding, 28 year olds sometimes) is because their minor league Aussie Football system pays decently enough for kids to come out of high school and play before going to college - thus they come into the states with 5 full years.

If you take a year off and you were not medically documented by the staff as being injured or experiencing some kind of hardship, you lose that year of eligibility as well.

DII/DIII programs have non-consecutive running clocks. If you take a year off, you preserve that year of eligibility for DII/DIII programs, no problem.

Private colleges tend to have more stringent transferring rules. For example, at least a few years ago at Boston College, you could not transfer into the school unless you had only been a freshmen at another college.

State schools tend to be more flexible on when you can transfer.

Wherever you are thinking of transferring to, there is a good chance that place has its own unique transferring quirks. So be sure to do your research when looking at other schools. It could be as simple as a ChatGPT or call to admissions.

The more credits you tend to have the harder it is to transfer in general. Most colleges, even transferring state to state schools, but especially state to private school transferring will knock out almost a semester’s worth of credits sometimes.

This can put you in the unenviable position of running out of athletic eligibility before you’ve completed your degree.

Because of this, unless it is a really unique situation, a lot of programs will shy away from junior or senior transfers.

Even at the world’s most selective institutions transferring as a graduate student is a lot easier than trying to get admitted as a freshmen. For example, at some higher academics like a Duke, you might need a 3.7 GPA out of high school to be a walk on, but as a graduate student you might need a 3.0 GPA only.

Because colleges and universities cater a lot more to undergraduate admissions, admissions is often a lot more supportive of football programs findin graduate players to fill out their school’s smaller but still-need-to-be-profitable graduate programs.

There is a deep transience and sense of angst young people - well really all people - have about if they’re making the right decision or not. The problem with college is that it doesn’t have a neat, predictable algorithm for determining if you made the right call. You often won’t know until it’s in retrospect whether or not college was a “fit” - even then you may still wonder “what if…?”

I remember last year, there was a buzzword “quiet quitting”. Basically, when someone checks out at work and starts bagging it in, doing just enough to keep the stability of their paycheck but not enough to get outright fired or not without a lot of effort on the part of HR.

Players “quiet” transfer too. They find that college football, while the same sport, is being played in an entirely different context than what they’re used to. So, they look for a distraction, they dive back into the chase for college - aka recruiting. They subtly hit up their old high school coaches, or trainers to “feel out” schools they’d like to transfer to.

And, while technically this is tampering, it’s nearly impossible to police. But, even if your old coach was able to facilitate a transfer move, there is nothing legally binding about any of this. A college program that gave your middle person positive indications they would take you can get fired, or just say “oops our bad, we found someone else sorry” and you are left standing there having your best option gone.

That’s all for now, thanks for stopping by👋

Brendan

PS: When you’re ready, here’s exactly how I can help you.