Florida State lands transfer QB Thomas Castellanos

Thomas Castellanos, one of college football's top transfer quarterbacks in the 2024 cycle, lands with the Seminoles for next season.

Thomas Castellanos lands with Florida State, giving the Seminoles a key transfer quarterback heading into the 2025 season. / Paul Rutherford-Imagn Images

Coming off a season to forget, Florida State landed the first piece of the puzzle on offense, as transfer quarterback Thomas Castellanos committed to the Seminoles out of the portal.

That comes after some early interest between Florida State and Castellanos when he elected to transfer away from Boston College, and it was to FSU that he visited early on.

With his commitment, the Seminoles earned the pledge of one of the best quarterbacks in the college football transfer portal as a consensus top 10 player at the position in this cycle.

Castellanos emerged as one of the nation’s more gifted dual threat quarterbacks over the last two seasons with the Eagles.

He completed nearly 59 percent of his pass attempts for 3,689 yards with 33 touchdowns and 19 interceptions, rushing for 1,427 yards and 15 additional touchdowns on 322 carries.

That includes a solid performance against Florida State the last two years, as he went 30 of 49 for 411 yards with 3 touchdowns and 1 pick in a 28-13 win with Boston College.

Against the Seminoles alone, Castellanos averaged nearly 10 yards per play with 5 total touchdowns and almost 290 total yards per game.

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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