143: Diaspora
A look at college football portal movement, plus another way to visualize ACC baseball standings.
The coaching carousel in college football is industrious. At some point during the regular season, we reach a silly period with countless rumors about coach hirings and firings.
In the year 2025, a big-time college football program likely has over 50 people employed to support it. At least 10 of those people are assistant coaches, and a handful of those coaches earn seven-figure salaries.
When you combine the volatile nature of college football with liberal player movement policies, you get a diaspora of players and coaches. Coordinators change jobs and bring players, and head coaches switch jobs and it ends up feeling like a merger and acquisition.
Curt Cignetti left James Madison for Indiana ahead of the 2024 season. Cignetti did not come alone. 12 coaches and 13 players traded their purple and gold for crimson and white last season. The strategy paid off for the Hoosiers. Indiana went 11-2 overall and made its debut in the first iteration of the 12-team College Football Playoff.
The 13 players that transferred to Indiana marked the largest import from one school to another school via the transfer portal. Records were meant to be broken.
Charles Huff left Marshall at the end of last season to become the head coach of Southern Miss. When Huff left, 36 Marshall players entered the transfer portal. The mass exodus promoted the Thundering Herd to opt out of the Independence Bowl, and it earned Marshall a $100,000 fine from the Sun Belt conference1.
18 of those 36 players have followed Huff to Hattiesburg, Mississippi. 18 players marks the largest import from one team to another team in the transfer portal era.
Not far behind is Washington State. The Cougars hired Jimmy Rogers at the end of 2024, and Rogers is bringing 16 players from South Dakota State to Pullman, Washington.
Here are the largest transfer portal imports over the past three seasons, along with the positions of the incoming players.
Incoming and outgoing
Another way to view this player movement is to try and visualize the incoming and outgoing transfers. This is a work in progress, but you can get a sense of how the transfer portal might look for two different programs in the diagrams below.
Dabo Swinney is entering his 18th season as head coach of the Clemson Tigers. Last year, Clemson did not have a single player join its program via the transfer portal. The Tigers are more active this season, but it is still not as active as a program like North Carolina. The Tar Heels and their new head coach Bill Belichick are a great representation of the diaspora in the sport.
The dashed lines for North Carolina try to represent incoming and outgoing players from the same school. For example, Carolina had two players (Gavin Blackwell, Caleb LaVallee) transfer to Florida State and one player transfer from Florida State (Timir Hickman-Collins). These charts don’t reveal the player’s position or rating or anything like that either, so keep that in mind2.
And now for a hard right turn back into college baseball.
ACC baseball standings
In the spirit of sticking with the theme over the past few weeks, here are the latest ACC baseball standings through May 11 games. This shows the change in conference record since the start of the season.
This chart highlights how teams like Clemson have tumbled down the stretch and teams like Notre Dame have played significantly better.
Each team is scheduled to play 10 three-game series against another league opponent. Because the league is composed of 16 baseball teams, it means every team misses five different conference opponents in league play3.
The reality is at least five of the 16 teams will not end up playing a 30-game league schedule due to cancellations. The teams atop the league have rarely faced one another, so this weekend’s North Carolina and Florida State series will shape the next month of the sport for ACC Tournament seeding, Regional host sites, and more.
Recommendations
The genesis of the transfer portal plots in this week’s newsletter came after listening to Phantom Island’s episode4 with Steven Godfrey and Parker Fleming. The two discuss offensive linemen and the transfer portal, and how the offensive line is often viewed as a weak link unit, but that might be changing due to the portal.
It’s a fun discussion around the transfer portal market in a position where talent and experience is often scarce. The idea of “chain transfers” or identifying the “feeder” systems in which players could plug and play into a new program is fascinating. Give it a listen below.
The same idea could be applied in other sports like basketball, where instead of rating transfers by production, what if you actually try to analyze the fit? Jon Fendler did that with a few college hoops teams, and it’s worth a read.
Thanks for reading this far, and please subscribe below if you haven’t already.
A paid episode of the Split Zone Duo podcast last month breaks down the Marshall and Huff breakup. It’s messy. Marshall won the Sun Belt and did not go to a bowl.
The next step in this analysis would be to make these charts interactive and add filters by offense/defense, player experience, player position, etc. I did write a function to spit out the Sankey charts, so if you’re curious about a certain team let me know.
Again, after the ACC basketball news last week with reducing conference games, please explain to me why each team needs to play every other team? It doesn’t happen in several other sports.
Phantom Island is part of a new outfit from Ryan Nanni and Steven Godfrey. The first episode covered LIV Golf, and whew, I’m embarrassed I did not know that LIV didn’t stand for anything, but it’s the actual Roman numerals for 54 holes. My goodness what an idea.