How the Transfer Portal has Affected SEC Rosters

A look at how the NCAA transfer portal has affected SEC football rosters over the past few years.

The introduction of the NCAA transfer portal has forever changed the landscape of college sports. It has given collegiate athletes the ability to transfer out of a four-year program and seek new opportunities at a different university while also maintaining immediate eligibility in the majority of cases. It's a great way for athletes to find a better situation but has also sparked an uptick in the amount of player movement that occurs across the nation.

The NCAA has made some tweaks to the portal over the years to help limit the year-round chaos that the portal was once causing by creating transfer windows that pinpoints certain times of the year when athletes can enter their name into the portal. These windows don't necessarily limit the number of players that enter the portal, but it does take some of the stress off of college coaches knowing when conversations about players wanting to transfer will and can occur. 

So how has the transfer portal affected SEC college football rosters specifically over the past few years? Well, to answer that question, let's take a look at the total number of players that have entered their names into the transfer portal for every single SEC program over the last three years. These numbers include every SEC football player that has entered the portal from the start of the 2021 season to the date of April 21, 2023. 

Number of players to enter the portal for each SEC program from 2021-2023 (via 247sports transfer portal log):

• Alabama: 52
• Arkansas: 52 
• Auburn: 54
• Florida: 47 
• Georgia: 42 
• Kentucky: 44 
• LSU: 50
• Mississippi State: 66
• Missouri: 57 
• Ole Miss: 60 
• South Carolina: 49 
• Tennessee: 74 
• Texas A&M: 63
• Vanderbilt: 50 

Clearly, the transfer portal has impacted some programs more than others. The most glaring one is Tennessee which has had the most players transfer out of the program over the past three years and by a pretty big margin. However, context is crucial, and in this case, the Volunteers experienced a coaching change at the end of the 2020 season when they shifted from Jeremy Pruitt to Josh Heupel. And big changes on a coaching staff are typically going to cause players to jump ship and head elsewhere. The Volunteers had 37 players hit the portal in 2021. 

Another interesting point of conversation that these numbers highlight is that Georgia has had the fewest amount of players transfer out of the program since 2021. The Bulldogs have seemingly done a lot of things right over the past couple of years and player retention appears to be another item that can be added to the list. Perhaps it's one of the many reasons why they will be their back-to-back national titles in 2023. 

Georgia wins the 2022 SEC Championship Game at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, Ga., on Saturday, Dec. 3, 2022. (Photo by Kayla Renie)

Taking a look at the numbers year by year, Mississippi State is the only SEC program that has had 20 or more players hit the portal for all three years. That's a lot of annual attrition on the roster for a program to endure and it also means it's a lot of new faces that the Bulldogs are introducing onto the team each year. 

The transfer portal does not affect all the programs the same as the numbers above display, and there is some good that the transfer portal brings. It allows programs to quickly fill voids on their rosters, it provides an avenue for athletes to seek a program that can provide them with more opportunities on the field or even just access to a change in scenery if that is needed. But it has also created frequent movement across rosters, and the SEC is just one example of that. 

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