When the transfer portal rules changed in 2024, not many fans expected it to be as noticeable as it’s become. Now, around 5000 players are entering their names in the portal yearly for college football. It’s made the game look and feel completely different. But Duquesne head coach Jerry Schmitt recently came out and revealed that the changes aren’t that new to him — they’re just different.
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In case you didn’t know, the NCAA decided to tweak the transfer portal before last season. Before the rules, players had to either sit out for a season when they were transferred or take a waiver from the NCAA to play. It was supposed to discourage switching schools and was fairly effective.
But now, players are eligible immediately after transferring. The rule goes hand in hand with the new NIL regulations that allow college athletes to be paid. All of a sudden, the transfer portal feels like a pseudo-Free Agency period, like we watch in the NFL every offseason.
However, Schmitt recently spoke about transfers when he was growing up as a coach, saying that this is nothing new to him.
“For us, it’s interesting, because back before you guys played, we had transfers all the time,” Schmitt revealed on The Christian Kuntz Podcast.
Schmitt then explained why this was the case for Duquesne. Mainly, it was because they are an FCS school, which is a step below the FBS. And the NCAA allowed players who transferred from the FBS to compete in their first season in the FCS. Duquesne saw its fair share of transfers, with those players wanting to play immediately before the new rules.
Schmitt said that the rules benefited them greatly, and that the differences today make it harder for them to land transfers.
“Before portal, if you transferred, you couldn’t go parallel. You had to go down to be eligible. So, you couldn’t go from Ohio State to pick. A lot of guys in this fertile Western Pennsylvania area, a lot of guys they would go away and wanted to transfer, they want to come back home. We benefited because if it went to Pitt, they’d have to sit a year. So, to play Division 1 football, they came to Duquesne,” Schmitt shared.
It was a nice loophole that Duquesne took advantage of for years. But now that players can go straight to college and play in year 1, their strategy has been nullified. Yet that hasn’t stopped Schmitt from leading the Dukes to back-to-back NEC championships in 2023 and ’24.
Still, the longtime head coach seemingly misses the old way of doing transfer business.
“Back then, we had all of the connections with coaches, high school, and college. Like, they would say, ‘Christian Kuntz at Ohio State, you know, he’s going to transfer and come home. Are you guys interested?’ Yes, absolutely. We’d have it wrapped up because there was no portal, social media.”
Nowadays, players use offers from other schools as leverage before accepting anything. With social media and the connectivity of the modern world, every coach in the NCAA has access to who is being recruited by what school and how often they’ve visited. It’s a completely different landscape.
It’ll be interesting to see if the new NIL rule changes help or harm the current state of things. Colleges are now allowed to directly compensate players, there will also be revenue sharing between schools as a sort of checks and balances system, and athletes can now negotiate deals before signing with a school. For old-school coaches like Schmitt, it’s a whole new ballgame. But it hasn’t stopped him and the Dukes from finding a way to succeed.
