Greg Sankey Demands End To Insane Transfer Portal Free-For-All To Save College Football
The SEC Commissioner pushes for a return to one-time transfer limits.
The advent of the transfer portal has changed the way college football teams build their rosters. In good ways and bad.
High school recruiting has become a crapshoot. Sure, it's nice to get excited over a 5-star player choosing your team, but every offseason becomes yet another recruiting battle to retain him. Just look at the USC Trojans. Husan Longstreet, one of the top quarterbacks in the 2024-2025 class, signed on, played in a backup role, then bolted for another school when he wasn't guaranteed the starting job in the upcoming 2026 season.
SC even leaned into the free agency-style situation now facing college teams, making public announcements when they "re-signed" players this offseason.
The Indiana Hoosiers won a National Championship by utilizing the portal to their advantage. Texas Tech has become the dominant power in the Big 12 overnight by using their financial resources to target top transfers. And the LSU Tigers, under new head coach Lane Kiffin, have reloaded in a single offseason, even becoming Longstreet's ultimate destination.
Portal chaos has become a ubiquitous part of the college football calendar, and SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey has a suggestion for how to bring some order to it.
SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey. (Photo by Tim Warner/Getty Images)
Sankey Wants Heavily Restricted Transfers
Speaking to reporters ahead of a women's basketball game this week, Sankey said that he wants to end the era of unrestricted, unlimited transfers.
"My advocacy would be, hey, we should be back to some type of one-time transfer exception," he explained. "But we have to support educational continuity if we truly believe that academics is the heart of what we do. And I’m a true believer in that.
"Yeah, we should be competitive. We should allow people to make decisions…This notion that we have 26, 27, 28-year-olds now playing against 19 and 20 year olds. That means there’s fewer opportunities to move from high school into college athletics. That’s not who we’ve been. That’s not who we should be. That’s where we get back to national standards, to the extent conferences need to manage that themselves. I think we’re ready to do that at the presidential level, that the NCAA can do that with kind of some new thinking and new rationale."
The presidential level, of course, being a reference to the upcoming summit on college sports hosted by President Trump, which Sankey will participate in.
Ultimately, though, is a one-time transfer rule even possible? Or likely? On the one hand, it's made college sports something of a free-for-all, in a way that most professional sports aren't. On the other hand, who's to say that athletes shouldn't be able to make the best decisions for themselves? Corporate employees not under contract, for example, can switch jobs anytime they want. Why shouldn't college athletes be able to do the same? Sankey might pretend that "academics is the heart of what we do," but nobody truly believes that in 2026.
It's a complicated question that has no simple solution. Maybe limiting transfers to two in one career might solve some of the problems without being too restrictive. Or normalizing two-year "contracts" between players and schools. Or maybe Sankey will get his way. After all, he usually does.