Significant changes are being ushered in this week by the NCAA’s D1 Council with major reductions to the Transfer Portal windows in football and basketball, as well as the elimination of National Letters of Intent.
In college football, which unofficially hits the season’s midpoint this weekend, there now is going to be a 20-day Portal window stretching the bulk of December and an additional 10-day period in April 2025.
Additionally, the absence of requiring prospective student-athletes to sign binding National Letters of Intent – in existence since 1964, under NCAA oversight since 2007 – is raising all-new questions as coaches seek to keep their current teams’ focus in the present.
Like Auburn’s Hugh Freeze, left asking a reporter on Wednesday’s SEC coaches’ call if the reporter had answers to the NIL change.
“Extremely hard,” Freeze said of juggling roster management with everyday coaching duties. “I don’t know how people keep up with things because I’m not on any news (social media) anymore right now and I just heard all of this in our staff meeting.
“I have no idea. So when you said there’s no more National Letter of Intent, what binds the kid to us in December? Do you know that?”
The NCAA at that time had yet to divulge exactly how the non-NLI approach would work; it since has released the following:
“The council also adopted changes to NCAA signing rules that transition the National Letter of Intent program protections into signing and recruiting rules, effective immediately. The change was made at the recommendation of the Conference Commissioners Association, which previously had administrative oversight of the NLI program.
“Moving forward, written offers of athletics aid will replace the NLI, and the previous formula for determining signing dates will be applied to those written offers. Transfer prospects may be signed by a new school once their names are permissibly entered in the Transfer Portal. After a prospect signs a written offer of athletics aid, other schools that offer athletically related financial aid will be prohibited from recruiting communications with that prospect.”
Freeze does welcome the reduction to the NCAA Transfer Portal windows, which are being trimmed from 45 total days down to 30, though he says the onset of Portal changes along with the new NLI approach makes things more confusing.
“It just made our world even more complicated. You combine that … Now, with the Transfer Portal being shortened, I’m all for that,” Freeze said. “I wish it was only seven days. I don’t think it should be that long. I think all the coaches agree with that.
“But the length of that is still too long. I’m glad it’s shortened some.”
Freeze also said one of the unspoken taboos aloud during his 10-minute appearance on the call: Roster tampering, even as no team has played more than six of its minimum 12 games, already is prevalent.
“You combine that with all the free-roaming other schools that want to ravish your roster constantly; it’s already started,” Freeze said. “We’ve created a world that’s not real healthy, I don’t think, for our sport. But yet, we as coaches, still have the opportunity to impact a lot of kids and a lot of lives and do a great job. We’re all blessed to have very good jobs, it’s just sad that some of it is tainted by so many different things that have changed it so drastically that I don’t think teach great life lessons.”