With the official advent of the name, image, and likeness (NIL) policy in college athletics in July of 2021, it had a demonstrable effect on the NCAA Transfer Portal, which began on Oct. 15, 2018. The Transfer Portal is a system which intends to streamline and create more transparency in the process of student-athletes transferring from one college to another.
The unintended consequence of the intersection of NIL and the transfer portal is it has become, in some aspects, an open market that is often palace intrigue. Athletic program general managers (a relatively new position), coaches, agents, parents, and other go-betweens engage in palace intrigue in a quest to gain the best financial and playing opportunities for student athletes endeavoring to transfer. And with it, accusations of tampering have become common and widespread.
Seton Hall University, which ended this season 21-12 and third in the Big East Conference, was not extended an invite to the NCAA Tournament. The school subsequently issued a statement that the team would not accept any other offers to play in a postseason tournament. (In 2024 they won the NIT championship after not making the NCAA Tournament.) Their head coach, Shaheen Holloway, this season’s Big East Coach of the Year, said playing in a tournament such as the College Basketball Crown, being held in Las Vegas from April 1-5, would provide other schools a platform to recruit his players, which he said has already begun although the transfer portal doesn’t officially open until April 7 and closes April 21.
“I’m sure they approached them already,” Holloway said to NJ Advance Media. “That’s just kind of where [college basketball] is.”
Holloway is intimately familiar with the machinations of tampering. In 2019, he was suspended by the NCAA for four games while in his second-year as St. Peter’s Univerity’s head coach for improper contact with a player when he was the associate head coach of Seton Hall under then head coach Kevin Willard — who is now the head coach of Villanova University.
The suspension stemmed from Holloway’s ecruitment of former college player Taurean Thompson, who at the time was a member of the Syracuse University men’s team. Thompson eventually transferred to Seton Hall in 2017. Willard incurred a two-game suspension for the incident.
Tampering in college football is far more egregious than in basketball, as the stakes are significantly higher for the sport that is the primary revenue driver for the athletic departments of virtually every Power Five (the top five college conferences) program.
Allegations of nefarious behavior are rampant. At a Jan. 23 press conference, Clemson University head coach Dabo Swinney, who has won two national championships (2016 and 2018) and nine ACC titles, put forth that University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) head coach Pete Golding carried out a “straightforward case of tampering.” What Swinney alleged was Golden’s relentless undertaking to entice former University of California linebacker Luke Ferrelli, the 2025 ACC Rookie of the Year, to attend Ole Miss. This is after Ferrelli, who entered the transfer portal in the first week of this past January, had already signed a revenue sharing contract with Clemson University and was working out with the team and attending classes.
On Jan. 22, Ferrelli dramatically changed his commitment to Ole Miss, prompting Swinney to characterize the portal as “flat out extortion” and deride: “We have a broken system and if there are no consequences for tampering, then we have no rules and we have no governance.”
There have been appeals from college administrators, coaches, agents, and other stakeholders to the NCAA to catalyze changes in portal procedures to stem tampering. Undoubtedly structural modifications will happen — when is uncertain.
“If we don’t act about these current transfer rules, we’re going to look up in five or six years and see a mass of players without degrees who’ll have spent their short-term money,” Swinney warned.
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