Penn State Sports Magazine
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/1082442
F O O T B A L L Wade will return, but transfer portal raises concerns When the NCAA's Division I Council changed its transfer process last summer, the objective was to give college athletes more control over their careers. Under the new rules, once an athlete notifies his school that he wants to enter the so-called transfer portal, the school is required to comply within two business days. After that, his name appears in a database accessible by coaches at other schools. Those coaches are allowed to contact him, and the athlete's current school doesn't have any say in which schools he talks to. Implemented this past fall, the process has, as expected, led to a surge in transfers. But in giving athletes more autonomy, it has also opened a portal into the thought process of many who might have preferred to keep their plans secret until they were ready to an- nounce at a time of their choosing that they were transfer- ring (or not trans- ferring, since players in the portal have the option of re- turning to their original school). The portal isn't accessible to the general public, but be- cause there are plenty of people in college sports who do have access to it, word gets around. The names of prominent players in the portal have leaked, and those players have had to deal with much more public scrutiny than they would have gotten under the previ- ous system. In January, it was reported that Penn State safety Lamont Wade had turned up in the NCAA's transfer database. A number of Nit- tany Lion players were also exploring their transfer options, but the news that Wade was N E W S & N O T E S RETURN GAME Wade an- nounced on Jan. 27 that he would be coming back to Penn State for his junior season after en- tering the trans- fer portal a few weeks earlier. Photo by Steve Manuel A N A L Y S I S B Y M A T T H E R B