140: Portal Whiplash
A look at the spring portal window for college football, and ACC baseball standings.
Maryland defensive lineman Lavon Johnson entered the transfer portal last week and allegedly signed a contract piece of paper with North Carolina, but later in the day signed a contract piece of paper with Texas instead.
Georgia Tech tight end Harry Lodge entered the portal last week and announced he will transfer back to Wake Forest. Lodge played in 10 games for the Demon Deacons last fall. The same is true for quarterback Ryan Browne as he boomeranged back to Purdue after transferring to North Carolina from Purdue earlier this year.
Neither Browne nor Lodge ever had a chance to play in an actual game at their first transfer portal destinations before returning back to their original schools1. The portal is damn near impossible to explain.
The story that captured most of the attention over the past week involved a highly rated quarterback. Nico Iamaleava, a quarterback who played in the college football playoff in December, tried to hold himself out of practice at Tennessee to renegotiate his contract. The problem? The Volunteers asked him to leave. Iamaleava is now planning to transfer to UCLA.
I’m not here to provide commentary2 or a lecture on the sanctity of college sports. It’s wacky, and that feels more like a feature than a bug.
What I find interesting is how we try to define success in the portal. Given it’s the week of the NFL draft — and it’s about value and need — let’s try to compare the two portal windows and player ratings for college football this season.
A common assumption is the spring portal is more or less about trading backups. While I suspect that is largely true, it’s why the Iamaleava story was surprising and fascinating.
Because it’s rare for a player of Iamaleava’s caliber to transfer in the spring. Using data from cfbfastR and 247Sports.com ratings, here is a look at the distribution of player ratings for any players that entered the portal prior to the 2025 season.
Iamaleava’s rating of 0.98, on a scale up to 1, is tied for the highest amongst any player that entered the portal prior to the 2025 season. Defensive end Damon Wilson II that transferred from Georgia to Missouri in January is the other player with a 0.98 rating.
The majority of players in the portal have around a 0.85 rating, which is equivalent to around 3 out of 5 stars using the 247Sports.com methodology. If you zoom out and compare these ratings by position across the two windows, you can see what type of positions are a commodity and others where there might be a surplus.
Over 300 wide receivers have entered the portal ahead of next season. These players range from as low as a 0.79 rating to as high as 0.96. It’s common for wide receivers to transfer because there are a lot of them. For example, these schools saw six wide receivers enter the portal: Alabama, Marshall, Purdue, and Tennessee.
As you follow the chart down, you’ll notice that interior linemen for both defense and offense are in the middle of the pack. These are players that can build the foundation of your team, and the highest rated defensive lineman across both windows entered the portal this past weekend for a short period of time. Oklahoma’s David Stone, 0.95 rating, has since withdrawn his name from the portal.
Perhaps Stone couldn’t find another school that would match his current salary at Oklahoma. After all, what is fascinating about Iamaleava and Stone is the two players were at SEC schools. The SEC prohibits players from transferring to another team inside the conference during the spring transfer portal window and receive immediate eligibility.
And we’re all aware the SEC is known for having deep pockets. I’ve been reading Jeff Pearlman’s book, The Last Folk Hero: The Life and Myth of Bo Jackson, and the 10th chapter stands out.
Bo Jackson was drafted out of high school by the New York Yankees in the second round and offered a $150,000 signing bonus. Jackson turned it down to attend Auburn. George Steinbrenner, Yankees owner, said to have proof that Auburn paid Jackson to attend college, but the information was never shared with the NCAA.
In the 10th chapter of the book, Pearlman outlines how the SEC has always paid players, see this excerpt:
Because pretty much everyone in America was cheating. Alabama paid players. Georgia paid players. Tennessee paid players. Florida paid players. If a program wanted to compete at the highest level, and enjoy all the perks that came with filled stadiums and televised Saturdays and kids in Laguna Niguel, California, and Mahopac, New York, knowing the words to your fight song, it meant purchasing elite talent. And if someone like Bo Jackson - one of ten kids raised by a single mother in a tiny house - had the option of signing with the New York Yankees for $150,000, you damn well better off incentives to turn it down.
“Everyone was throwing big bucks at us,” said Tony Robinson, the University of Tennessee’s star quarterback and onetime prized recruit out of Tallahassee, Florida. “Especially in the SEC, winning didn’t come cheap.”
The more things change, the more they stay the same. And the more money, the more problems.
The book is a fun read, and it’s fascinating how Pearlman tries to explain the culture and times in the 1980s. Jackson was a mythical athlete, some of the baseball stories alone are incredible.
Anyhow, speaking of baseball …
ACC Baseball Standings
College baseball is in full swing. This season there are 16 teams competing in the Atlantic Coast Conference. Each team is scheduled to play 10 opponents in a three-game series, five home and five away. All 16 teams make the ACC Tournament this season too, and it’s even single elimination.
Needless to say, the schedules are unbalanced and the league standings are hard to grok. This past weekend the series between Florida State and Virginia was cancelled because of a tragic school shooting3.
The majority of teams have three to four series left. As the season continues, I’m going to try and surface more charts showing league standings.
Here is a list of the standings with run differentials by location:
Thanks for reading this far, and please subscribe if you haven’t already. As for a recommendation this week, Pearlman’s book about Bo Jackson is super entertaining, check it out.
The article that I would find fascinating to read is an interview with a person that works in collegiate admissions. How many hours are spent trying to transfer credits back and forth? How hard is it to sort out?
Richard Johnson did a great job trying to explain this situation for CBS.
A sentence that feels like it can only be written in America. Something needs to change.