Debbie Yow views the Transfer Portal with Skepticism

College athletics created a trap without knowing it.

The conversation around college athletics reform tends to fixate on NIL deals, revenue sharing, and conference realignment.

Those debates are loud, visible, and they attract attention.

The quieter transfer portal crisis, the one unfolding in the background without much fanfare, involves student-athletes who were told they had options to transfer and then discovered, too late, that they didn’t.

It’s the scenario that troubles Debbie Yow the most.

The Portal in Question

What is the transfer portal?
The NCAA Transfer Portal is an online database, launched in 2018, where college athletes can formally register their intent to transfer to a different school. Once an athlete enters the portal, other programs can contact them and offer scholarships. Think of it as a free-agent marketplace for college sports.

Who can use the transfer portal?
Any Division I, II, or III athlete can enter the portal. In 2021, the NCAA introduced a one-time transfer exception allowing athletes to switch schools once without sitting out a season. Then in 2024, the NCAA went further, approving unlimited transfers for any academically eligible athlete. The barrier to leave has never been lower. The addition of NIL (Name, Image, and Likeness) rights and revenue sharing has only complicated the picture further. Athletes can now monetize their personal brand and, increasingly, receive a direct cut of school revenue, meaning a transfer decision is no longer just about playing time or fit. It’s a financial calculation. A better offer, a bigger market, or a more lucrative NIL deal at a rival program can be enough to trigger a move, turning the portal into something closer to free agency than the student-athlete framework the NCAA was built on.

Why does the transfer portal matter beyond the athlete?
Scholarships don’t travel with the athlete. The original school can reallocate them, but the roster hole left behind is immediate. Coaching staffs now recruit in two windows: the traditional high school cycle and the portal window. Managing both simultaneously, often competing against bigger programs with deeper pockets, has fundamentally reshaped how athletic departments operate at every level.

The Kids Nobody’s Checking On

The portal feels like the logical next move. Then reality arrives.

“These kids were told they were special by their advisors, that better opportunities were waiting for them somewhere else. And then those opportunities never became a reality” says Yow.

The sequence goes like this: the athlete leaves their original school. Their spot on their original team gets filled. No other school comes calling. They’re now stuck in a gap that no one designed and there is no safety net.  The questions becomes painfully simple: “Where are they? Are they still in college?  Who’s paying for it? How is that gonna work? Did they quit?”

According to NCAA data covering August 2023 to July 2024, nearly one in three Division I athletes who entered the portal remained unsigned, left without a team, a scholarship, or a clear academic path forward.

The portal is still new enough that the full picture is still forming.

The early one, though, is not reassuring.

A Collision Nobody Fully Understood

Good intentions don’t always produce good outcomes.

The transfer portal, taken alone, might have been a reasonable expansion of athlete choice. NIL, taken alone, introduced legitimate earning opportunities for college athletes.

The problem is that these two forces arrived at roughly the same time, each amplifying the other in ways nobody fully anticipated.

“The intent was genuine. Give student-athletes more freedom, more options, more control over their futures. Yow says, “But when the transfer portal and NIL arrived together, almost simultaneously, alongside direct revenue sharing from institutions, the combination created something nobody was fully prepared for.”

In 2023 alone, over 31,000 student-athletes entered the portal across all divisions. Only 45% found new schools, leaving more than 17,000 athletes without a competitive home, a scholarship, or in many cases, a completed degree.

The result is an environment where the financial incentives to move are higher than ever, the barriers to leaving are lower than ever, and the people advising athletes, such as agents, handlers, and well-meaning family members, don’t always have long-term skin in the game.

What Gets Lost in the Shuffle

There’s something less obvious eroding underneath all of this.

A student-athlete who used to remain at a school for four years built something durable with the alumni community there. Those relationships carried weight long after graduation.

A booster who watched them compete for four seasons might hire them a decade later. A faculty member who knew them through their full undergraduate career might write a job reference that could change their life.

Before the unlimited portal, it was far more likely that a student-athlete would remain at their original school, partly because the sit-out year created a natural buffer to the idea of transferring.

Debbie Yow sees that friction as something that served a real purpose: it gave athletes time to acclimate and, in many cases, prompted them to work through difficulties at their original school rather than run from them.

“People say that coaches can move whenever they decide to, so athletes should be provided the same opportunity, but coaches often pay large buyouts to have that privilege. We have been comparing apples to oranges in that regard.”

Strip it away entirely, and something gets lost alongside it.

“Every time you transfer, you start over. The alumni don’t know you. The faculty doesn’t know you. You just arrived.” The network that could have become a post-career launching pad dissolves before it ever forms. This might not be an issue for the elite athlete in a revenue-producing sport who appears destined to become a successful pro. But it will definitely matter to a majority of athletes who will never make a living from their sport.”

Old Enough to Live with the Consequences

Now, the tension at the center of all of this.

The athletes most affected by the portal are typically 18 to 22 years old.

That’s not a criticism of them. It’s a structural reality.

Debbie Yow has spent decades working with young people in that age range, and her take on their decision-making is blunt but compassionate: “Most of us, if we’re being honest, would admit we made some decisions between 18 and 22 that we’d take back if we could.”

The system assumes that 18-year-olds, handed multi-figure NIL offers and surrounded by representation, will consistently make decisions in their own long-term interest. History, inside and outside of sport, suggests that’s a lot to assume.

What these athletes need, Yow argues, are genuine mentors. Not handlers. Not agents with their own financial stake in a transfer decision. Actual people who care whether the athlete graduates, builds relationships, and lands somewhere stable five years after eligibility runs out.

The fix, she believes, requires legislative guardrails.

Some version of congressional action or a meaningful antitrust carve-out that gives the NCAA the ability to make enforceable rules.

“At some point, meaningful legislation has to come. Something that actually gives schools, or an organization like the NCAA, the authority to set rules that hold or collective bargaining of some type that does not require legislation.

Congress hasn’t shown much appetite for it. The portal keeps spinning.

The Finish Line That Actually Matters

Strip away all the policy debate, and Debbie Yow’s concern comes down to something far more personal.

Research from Sports Illustrated confirms that even a single school change typically slows an athlete’s progress toward a degree, and each additional transfer compounds that slowdown, as credit incompatibilities between institutions multiply.

The academic cost of mobility, it turns out, is rarely part of the conversation when an 18-year-old is weighing their options.

That matters enormously to Debbie Yow, because the achievement she has called most treasured across a 29-year career as a Division I athletics director wasn’t a national championship or a landmark coaching hire. It was graduation morning.

The senior breakfast before the ceremony, the alma mater sung with parents and grandparents in the room, athletes crossing the stage to collect degrees they’d earned through years of competition and coursework.

“That degree is permanent,” she has reflected. Whatever comes next, whatever changes, the education is theirs for life.”

That’s the finish line the unlimited transfer portal increasingly puts at risk. Not conference championships, not NIL earnings, but the thing that was supposed to matter most all along.