Roster movement is almost a year-round affair in college football, thanks to the institution of the transfer portal and introduction of player compensation. In our best effort to keep you up to date on the rumblings around the country, here is the second edition of The Athletic’s Portal Buzz.
Single portal window
The transfer portal change coaches have long pushed for took one step closer to becoming reality on Thursday.
The Division I Football Oversight Committee voted to approve a move to a single transfer portal window, beginning Jan. 2 and lasting 10 days. The move still must be approved by the NCAA’s administrative committee, and a vote is expected before Oct. 1. But what does this mean for player movement?
The spring transfer portal window, which lasted 10 days in April, will be eliminated.
The winter transfer portal window will move out of December, after most bowl games are complete, and will be sliced in half (it was 20 days in 2024).
Graduate transfers, who last year were able to enter the portal on Oct. 1 and were eligible to enter all the way through the end of the spring window, will also be restricted to the 10-day January window.
There will still be an immediate 30-day window to enter the portal for players at schools that make a coaching change.
FBS head coaches who attended the American Football Coaches Association convention in January unanimously supported this exact model. Their goal is to reduce year-round roster churn and prevent players from leaving the team following spring practice. More than 3,000 FBS scholarship players entered the transfer portal last offseason, and more than 1,100 of them did so in the spring.
Many coaches are happy with this change because it alleviates some of the December chaos, when the postseason, the early signing period for high school recruits, the coaching carousel and the transfer portal window were all happening simultaneously. The early signing period has been moved up to the Wednesday before conference championship games, which is Dec. 3 this year. There will now be almost a full month between the end of the early signing period (Dec. 5) and the portal window opening, and if approved, December would be a dead period, with no recruiting visits allowed.
The elimination of a spring portal window should also curtail spring poaching, when Power 4 programs swoop in to lure Group of 5 or FCS players into the portal to fill needs that were identified during spring football. The spring portal window was also when the Nico Iamaleava saga unfolded at Tennessee. Coaches and personnel staffers are hopeful that the elimination of the spring window will bring some stability to revenue-sharing contracts, as players would no longer be able to use the second portal window as leverage for pay increases.
But not everyone is happy about the proposed change. One general manager told The Athletic on Thursday that he disliked the proposal because spring semester classes begin in January and getting transfers on visits, committed and admitted to school in such a tight window will be challenging, especially for schools that begin class the first week of January. A second GM echoed that sentiment.
The most frequently asked question by GMs on Thursday was, “How are we going to get all these guys into school in time?”
There’s also speculation that tampering, which is technically against the rules but has become standard practice in the transfer portal and player compensation era because of how difficult it is to enforce, will run rampant in December in the weeks between the end of the regular season and the opening of the portal window. An agent who represents dozens of FBS prospects said players on teams that don’t play during the postseason will “be hit up (in December) either by agents or coaches who are bold enough to do it directly.”
The agent also expressed frustration that this change is being made unilaterally, without player input.
“If you’re going to restrict movement, concessions need to be made,” he said. “What concessions are they making? None. … This is so one-sided.”
A third GM strongly supported the rule change because of how much more manageable it makes the college football calendar. It will allow teams to play the postseason and for personnel staffs to prepare properly for the portal window without having to worry about hosting visitors while simultaneously trying to win a postseason game.
“This is the happiest I’ve been about a college rule change in a while,” he said.
The right fit
When Auburn made a run to the 2013 BCS National Championship Game, then-Tigers’ head coach Gus Malzahn didn’t have a 6-foot-5, pro-style passer slicing up defenses week after week. He had Nick Marshall, a 6-1, 210-pound dual-threat dynamo who began his college career at Georgia as a cornerback.
So it should come as no surprise that Malzahn’s latest quarterback reclamation project, a short-statured, speedy transfer named Tommy Castellanos, terrorized Alabama in much the way Marshall did the SEC a dozen years ago.
A Power 4 coach who has faced the 5-11, 201-pound Castellanos, when asked to assess the quarterback’s game, said, “Think Nick Marshall. Him being with Gus makes perfect sense.”
After Castellanos gave the Crimson Tide’s defense hell in a 31-17 win over the weekend, one of Week 1’s biggest eye-openers, it’s easy in retrospect to appreciate the type of fit he is for Malzahn, FSU’s new offensive coordinator.
But there was plenty of skepticism about Castellanos when he left Boston College last November following a quarterback change with three games to go. BC coach Bill O’Brien opted to start Grayson James instead of Castellanos, who burst onto the scene in 2023 under former coach Jeff Hafley and started eight of the first nine games under O’Brien last season. Castellanos entered the transfer portal in December and landed in Tallahassee with Mike Norvell and Malzahn, the coach who signed him out of high school at UCF.
Although Castellanos and BC beat Florida State to open last season and started a promising 4-1, he never quite fit O’Brien’s pro-style offense. Under Hafley, Castellanos used his athleticism to rush for 1,113 yards and 13 touchdowns in 2023. Last season, those numbers shrunk to 194 yards and one touchdown (though he was slowed by a midseason injury).
Castellanos and O’Brien traded verbal jabs this offseason. Castellanos told On3 in June that he and O’Brien “butted heads” early last season and that, in retrospect, he wishes he had left after Hafley took a job with the Green Bay Packers. O’Brien told ESPN in July, “Tommy can think what he wants,” and “We supported the hell out of Tommy.”
Norvell needed an offensive reset after Florida State’s disastrous 2-10 season, which followed the 13-1 College Football Playoff snub season in 2023. FSU ranked 131st nationally in scoring and 132nd in yardage in 2024. Norvell infused his offense with transfers, eight of whom started in the Alabama win, including four offensive linemen. But Malzahn and Castellanos were the centerpieces, and their union couldn’t be better. Malzahn’s offense thrives with a mobile quarterback, and in turn, Castellanos plays better when he’s allowed to use his running ability.
⚡️⚡️⚡️@Tommy_casto #NoleFamily | #Driven pic.twitter.com/naAeckzIHE
— FSU Football (@FSUFootball) August 30, 2025
“His ability to run the football, particularly in a zone read element on the perimeter, at such an elite level makes him a good quarterback because it makes his passing better,” the opposing Power 4 coach said. “He is not a great passer. You don’t worry about him picking you apart, but because he can run it so well, the way you have to play him to stop that gives him the ability to complete easier, higher percentage one-on-one type passes.”
Castellanos was effective, rushing for 78 yards and one touchdown and averaging 10.9 yards per attempt on 14 passes. The threat of his running ability opened things up for the offense, which rolled to 230 yards on the ground.
Norvell called Castellanos a “remarkable competitor” after the win and said that “when he steps on the field, 10 guys on offense are better.”
Though his mid-November departure from Chestnut Hill drew plenty of criticism, it’s paying off because he found a better fit. And after the Seminoles’ whupping of Alabama vaulted them to No. 14 in the Associated Press Top 25, it looks like Norvell may have recaptured some of the transfer portal magic that led to the Seminoles’ successful 2023 campaign.
The reluctant transfer
No matter how much money or effort a Group of 5 team puts into retaining a player, it’s usually an uphill battle if a Power 4 program wants him badly enough.
Veteran quarterback Chandler Morris, who transferred from North Texas to Virginia this offseason, is a prime example. Morris, who began his career at Oklahoma and twice won the starting job at TCU before injuries derailed each season, had a career year for the Mean Green last season, leading The American Conference with 3,774 passing yards and 31 touchdowns. He had multiple Power 4 offers before deciding to join the Cavaliers, but not before UNT made a run at keeping him.
North Texas coach Eric Morris (no relation) said Chandler Morris was emotional when meeting with his head coach to discuss transferring. Virginia had offered roughly triple the money that the Mean Green could.
“He’s bawling, crying, because he had an offer on his phone — which, we raised a ton of money and we were going to try to pay him and treat him how he should be treated — and Virginia offers him a lot more money,” Eric Morris said in July. “I said, ‘Chandler, you deserve this. Go to Virginia and play this last year and have fun and compete your ass off.’”
Two sources briefed on the discussions told The Athletic that North Texas offered Morris around $500,000 to stay, which would put Virginia’s offer in the $1.5 million range. That’s within the typical range for a Power 4 starting quarterback, where the floor is typically $1 million per year, but the ceiling can reach above $3 million in the case of transfers like Duke’s Darian Mensah or Miami’s Carson Beck.
Doling out a seven-figure offer to a player is a challenge for Group of 5 teams. Most Power 4 athletic departments are spending at or near the $20.5 million cap established by the House v. NCAA settlement and, in most cases, 65 to 75 percent of that money is allocated toward football, putting most P4 football rev share budgets in the $13 million to $15 million range. That excludes any third-party name, image and likeness deals, which are subject to approval by the newly-established College Sports Commission.
G5 programs spend a fraction of that. The American, where North Texas plays, does have some schools willing to invest at a higher level. Three conference sources told The Athletic last month that USF has a football roster budget in the $8 million to $10 million range, which was well above the expected ceiling for the conference. Memphis and Tulane are also believed to be on the higher end of the conference’s roster budget spectrum. The rev share floor in The American is believed to be around $2 million, and North Texas is believed to be much closer to that number than USF’s.
In discussing how different it is to manage a team in the modern era with roster budgets and player negotiations, Morris joked: “I’m a lot better at Excel than I ever wanted to be. … I figured out how to work a damn spreadsheet.”
Meanwhile, Chandler Morris got off to a strong start at Virginia, throwing for 264 yards and two touchdowns and rushing for 50 yards in a 48-7 win over Coastal Carolina. Chandler was shaken up after absorbing a big hit at the end of a 28-yard run in the third quarter. Virginia coach Tony Elliott said Tuesday that Morris was “full go” at practice on Monday and that the expectation is he’ll be ready to go for the Cavaliers’ road trip to NC State on Saturday.
(Photo of Tommy Castellanos: Butch Dill / Getty Images)
