College Football 26 Must Do More With Transfer Portal

The transfer portal opened on December 9 and over 1,500 scholarship players have entered their names into it so far. The transfer portal has changed the landscape of college football, and it needs to do the same in College Football 26.

I’ll let you guess how many players enter the portal in an average College Football 25 season…Go ahead, I’ll wait and let you think, don’t cheat.

The answer is about 700 players. In this upcoming college football offseason, on top of the 1,500-plus scholarship players in the portal, 500-plus non-scholarship players have also entered the portal so far. By sheer numbers alone, College Football 25 is falling short of where we need to be.

Recruiting is the main draw outside of playing games. While we can quibble about the mechanics of recruiting itself, it’s undeniable that the portal can’t just be an extension of normal recruiting. Just boosting the number of players in the portal won’t cure this current issue.

It’s also true that in College Football 25 the number of quality players entering the portal drops year-over-year to a degree that you really won’t find many intriguing players in the portal as you get into Year 4 and beyond. However, fixing that issue also wouldn’t make the portal interesting enough for ’26. The “how” you get to those larger numbers in the portal is really what will matter.

I’m sure there are plenty of ways to tackle the “how” behind getting more players into the portal, but within the existing structures we do have right now, I would hope the dealbreaker mechanic starts to matter more. The dealbreaker mechanic is a smart way to differentiate programs from one another, but the dealbreakers are not strict enough or dynamic enough right now. If you play enough years of dynasty mode, you will undoubtedly notice how many good players are rotting on the benches of top-tier programs. It’s not uncommon to see certain teams carrying 6-plus QBs when multiple players on that depth chart should be looking for the exit door.

Whether it’s through a dealbreaker that changes, having multiple dealbreakers for a player, or a dealbreaker that becomes stricter as a player gets older, these would all be effective ways to improve roster turnover. If a freshman QB comes on campus with a dealbreaker of playing time, then he might be understanding of being benched in Year 1, maybe even Year 2. However, if he’s a rising Junior, he should no longer have that patience.

Alternatively, perhaps a player comes on campus just worried about academics, but then after being on a losing program for multiple years, he wants to leave to go to a winning program. Another way to approach it might just be to give players multiple dealbreakers like playing time and winning program.

And, again, it’s not enough to just solve this issue. The portal itself should be much more stringent than normal recruiting. You can’t be out there promising two QBs who want playing time the starting job. However, making specific promises to the recruits would be a way to actually add a layer to the portal.

One thing that does need to be fixed in any situation is the offseason progression. Right now, anyone entering the portal loses out on those offseason training results, which means those players do not progress in any way and thus are less valuable by default. Whether this is a bug or by design is irrelevant at this point, it just needs to be changed for ’26.

I’m sure some might end up being annoyed by the number of their players who end up entering the portal each year, but this is the new reality of college football. While it’s cool to get that top recruiting class, it doesn’t mean you get to hold on to all those players for an indefinite period of time. I would welcome that added layer of challenge, as it would put even more focus on recruiting, the portal, roster management, playing time, and how you manage your roster. Plus, it would just be more realistic, and more realism in our sports games is rarely a bad thing.