College Football Spring Transfer Portal Nearing: What You Need to Know

College football's spring transfer portal window is fast approaching. Here's what you need to know.

Scenes from a college football game. / © Joshua L. Jones via Imagn Content Services, LLC

As the college football landscape moves through the preseason spring practice phase and plays its traditional spring games, the sport also heads into another critical part of its seasonal calendar: the new spring transfer portal window.

It's two vital weeks for programs across the country to assess their rosters and judge positions of need with a chance to patch things up before the season kicks off.

This month finds the two-week transfer portal window on the schedule, the second of the offseason, in which players can enter their names and take a shot at a new school.

Back during the winter following bowl season and the College Football Playoff, more than 2,000 players put their names into the transfer portal.

We're not expected to see quite that many players on the move this time, but there should be a sizable number of prospects looking to get a change of scenery.

So how does this all work? Here's your primer for the upcoming transfer portal window for the spring phase and what you can expect moving forward.

Where we left off: 2024 College Football Transfer Portal Team Rankings

Transfer portal dates

The spring college football transfer portal window officially opens up on Tuesday, April 16 and is scheduled to close again on Tuesday, April 30.

Graduate transfers must enter the portal by May 1.

Originally, the NCAA laid down plans to open things up from May 1 to May 15, but the Division I Council, the body with that authority to make changes, moved the window up a little further on the calendar to correspond with spring football dates.

How the college football transfer portal works

The NCAA Transfer Portal is a private database that includes the names of student-athletes in every sport at the Division I, II, and III levels. The full list of names is not available to the public.

A player can enter their name into the transfer portal through their school's compliance office. 

Once a player gives written notification of their intent to transfer, the office puts the player's name into the database, and they officially become a transfer.

The compliance office has 48 hours to comply with the player's request and NCAA rules forbid anyone from refusing that request.

The database includes the player's name, contact information, info on whether the player was on scholarship, and if he is a graduate student.

Once a player's name appears in the transfer portal database, other schools are free to contact the player, who can change his mind at any point in the process and withdraw from the transfer portal.

Notably, once a player enters the portal, his school no longer has to honor the athletic scholarship it gave him. 

And if that player decides to leave the portal and return to his original school, the school doesn't have to give him another scholarship.

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