Seth Gross and Austin DeSanto get in a scramble in the finals of the Midlands Championships (Photo/Sam Janicki, SJanickiPhoto.com)The biggest cartel in sport -- the NCAA -- just got nicer.
Over the past decade, Mark Emmert and the NCAA have been taken to task in the media and in the courts -- having to defend business practices which are said to exploit student-athletes. In October 2018, when the transfer portal was introduced, athletes earned the right to free agency -- to come and go as they wish from school to school or town to town. This newfound luxury is arguably the biggest tangible advancement in student-athlete rights to date.
Per the NCAA's website, the transfer portal was created as, "A compliance tool to systematically manage the transfer process from start to finish, add more transparency to the process among schools and empower student-athletes to make known their desire to consider other programs."
While the original goal of the portal was rooted in creating a more efficient administrative process for compliance personnel, the results of the portal have extended far beyond. The impact of the transfer portal is nothing short of revolutionary for NCAA athletics -- especially those that are a part of Big Ten wrestling.
"That's [assistant coach] Jake Varner's job, he checks the transfer portal every day," Penn State head coach Cael Sanderson told PennLive.com. "One of his jobs…that's not his only responsibility," he said with a chuckle. "But I mean that's just part of college wrestling now. And college athletics in general."
The process is simple. First, the athlete goes to their current school's compliance department to tell them they want to be entered into the transfer portal. Then, within 48 hours the athlete is entered into the portal. Compliance and/or the coaching staff can't say no; they can only delay it for a day or two. In the end, the transfer request must be fulfilled.
Already, within the first year-and-a-half since the portal's inception, we have seen the impact of such decisions play out on the mat.
The recent dominance of Penn State grapplers has put them in rare air. Since 2011, the Nittany Lions have brought eight of the last nine team titles to State College and will contend for another one in 2020. In totality, 12 grapplers have brought 23 individual championships to Happy Valley since 2011.
Penn State's achievements speak for themselves. They are a blue-chip program that has won convincingly over the last decade. That said, even they aren't immune to the frequent arrivals and departures of wrestlers thanks to the transfer portal -- they might even owe some of their success to the new portal.
[We're] just kind of figuring out how it works and trying to be on top of it, but it's just kind of the way it is now," Sanderson said to Jim Carlson of PennLive.com.
Sanderson doesn't expect occurrences such as these to stop, but rather continue indefinitely.
In the last few weeks alone, Adam Busiello and Greg Kerkvliet have transferred into Penn State to don the Blue & White singlet while Brody Treske has transferred out, electing to continue a wrestling career closer to home at Northern Iowa.
The 23-time national champion Iowa Hawkeyes -- who currently rank No. 1 in the latest InterMat rankings-- are no stranger to bringing in transfer grapplers either.
Currently, 20% of the Hawks starting lineup are late additions to the program in Austin DeSanto and Pat Lugo. That percentage would be as high as 30% if former Missouri Tiger Jaydin Eierman, who is now in the Iowa wrestling room, wasn't taking advantage of an Olympic redshirt.
Overall, more than three-fourths of the Big Ten's 14 member schools feature varsity wrestling rosters chalk-full of transfer athletes. For the schools that don't have a transfer on their active roster, they likely lost a student-athlete to transfer in recent years.
Here are some of the more notable wrestling transfer storylines to hit Big Ten -- the NCAA's premier conference for college wrestling -- over the last handful of seasons:
So, it doesn't matter whether you love, hate, or are indifferent to the NCAA's fancy new toy, one that draws its name from Star-Trekian origins, because the portal is here to stay and it will likely impact your wrestling program in one way or another.
The portal has changed collegiate wrestling as we once knew it. It has not only enhanced the rights of student-athletes everywhere by creating an amateur free-agent marketplace, but also it has shown that -- with the help of a transfer -- a team can easily go from a "pretender" to a "contender" or even a national champion. The power of the transfer athlete is magnified even more in a sport like wrestling -- where there are just ten athletes in the starting lineup -- thus one wrestler can start to transform an entire program.
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