The wide popularity of professional sports and the added dimension of fantasy sports have trained American fans to think like general managers. Things like salary caps and pay scales practically beg the die hards to open up mental, if not actual, spreadsheets and try to decide how to allocate fixed resources within a team. Heck, Michael Lewis’s book Moneyball has become both a noun and a verb to refer to finding an edge through creative roster management.
The recent court cases and rule changes about NIL and transfers have brought that mentality down to the college sports level in earnest. It was always there some with recruiting. No one used to be paid above board, so the financial aspect was not explicit, but how many recruits to take in total and at each position could scratch the itch. But now, thanks to the revenue sharing that the House settlement created (plus estimates for NIL payments that the House settlement likely can’t and won’t completely tame), the college fan can get the full general manager’s experience thanks to definitely totally legit Internet estimates of player value that are certainly grounded in reality and not greatly manipulated by player agents.
Due to varying levels of resistance to the new model, from Dabo Swinney on one end of the spectrum to Deion Sanders on the other, the change hasn’t happened evenly everywhere at once. It’s come in waves through the country as programs come to terms with the new normal at their own speeds.
Billy Napier was never as extreme in his reluctance to play the portal game as his former boss at Clemson, but he was somewhere on Swinney’s half of the spectrum. Napier was often quite slow to offer transfer recruits because he preferred to take his time with evaluations, and he missed out on a lot of top talent by not moving quickly enough. Before last season, he spoke approvingly about the number of transfers in having come down from prior years and said he wanted to be less dependent on the portal.
The approach and remarks dovetail with Napier’s general risk aversion. In an ideal world, a team would be built primarily through high school recruiting and only use the portal to supplement the roster in the three scenarios Napier named: early NFL Draft declarations, injuries, and guys not playing up to their projections. A team built in such a fashion would in theory have few holes to fill and therefore be protected from the threat of not being able to find and land suitable replacements in the portal.
And, for what it’s worth, Napier was very good at keeping his best players around. In his four seasons, he only lost three guys who could be considered among the best on the team at the time: Trevor Etienne and Princely Umanmielen after 2023 and Jack Pyburn after 2024.
The end result was Florida taking just seven transfers in the 2025 offseason, which was lower than programs with much better recruiting operations like Georgia and Ohio State per the 247 Sports transfer tracker. The Buckeyes had just lost some good players from winning a national title, but they took seven the cycle before. It was an amount of transfer inflow you’d see at a real title contender and not a program that hadn’t won double-digit games in half a decade.
Napier’s skill at retention meant it never felt like everyone on the team was up for grabs, and his lower sense of urgency in the portal meant that there was still a strong roster through line even in the high transfer years of 2023 and 2024. There were still things like, in 2023, where Damieon George and Micah Mazzccua blocked for Graham Mertz, or Mannie Nunnery or RJ Moten tried to assist Cam Jackson and Caleb Banks on stopping a run play. It wasn’t like you could completely miss the fact that there were new transfers around. It did, however, still feel like a built Florida team with transfer additions rather than a roster rebuilt from the portal.
That insulation from the new model is gone now.
This offseason has seen the beat writers have to maintain three running lists: which Gator players announced they were staying, which announced they were leaving, and which players from elsewhere committed to transfer in. “Everyone on the team was up for grabs”, indeed.
Some of this is inevitable when the coaching staff turns over. There have always been players who leave when a new head ball coach arrives, even back when guys had to sit out a year to do it. However nearly all barriers to player movement are gone now, so the figures are a lot higher.
In addition, Jon Sumrall has not had the luxury of sitting back and relying on his recruiting as a G5 head coach. Power conference teams increasingly pillage the mid-majors every offseason, and 2024 Tulane was no exception. Sumrall had to replace an incredible amount of production prior to 2025, which is why statistically his most recent team was a regression from ’24 and why the job he did to win the conference and secure a College Football Playoff spot is all the more impressive.
Sumrall has seen what canny portal work can do for a program, and I suspect there’s no going back for him. Plus with UF moving to a GM model with Dave Caldwell, retention for retention’s sake is probably not something we’re going to see much of anymore.
Of those three prized players Napier lost, two of them aren’t completely symptoms of the new era. Etienne wanted to play for a title contender, and the Gators weren’t going to be one in 2024. Florida was never going to keep him around. Umanmielen said he was unhappy with his development and sought better coaching. If that is at least mostly true, UF probably couldn’t have convinced him to return either.
Pyburn was different. He was a good player who wanted to return. But, in addition to having his own issues with how coaches were deploying him, he reportedly asked for a financial figure the school declined to meet.
That’s how it goes nowadays. Though edge is a premium position, Florida had a lot of guys there: Tyreak Sapp, Kam James, George Gumbs, and LJ McCray, plus a freshman the staff was excited about in Jayden Woods. The NIL pot isn’t bottomless. Florida would’ve been better in run defense had it kept Pyburn around — provided it acceded to his other requests about playing time and usage, which is a separate issue — but he just wasn’t a must-keep-at-any-price kind of player.
I think it’s likely we’ve seen more of that in the time since the portal opened this month with players such as Tre Wilson and Michai Boireau. Possibly others, too. The rules around player compensation and transfer mean that if a player believes enough in himself and doesn’t like the number he was offered, he can go somewhere else.
Take the case of Wilson. I strongly believe that Napier misused his talents for years, and that he could be a true No. 1 receiver for a P4 team. Yet, this winter Florida prioritized Vernell Brown III and Dallas Wilson over him. Those two have a higher potential upside, and not for nothing have more years of eligibility left. If Wilson wanted more than what Florida’s No. 3 (at best) receiver is going to get, regardless of who that is, then it’s his prerogative to see if he can do better elsewhere.
Florida won’t have 30 players leave and a couple dozen transfer in each year. The staff turnover effect is still very real.
However, I don’t think we’re going to see many more years where there are only seven incoming transfers. The culture of college football has changed, and almost no one is left who can remember the “year in residence” requirement that made transfers have to sit out a year. The one-time free transfer rule went into effect in 2021, and the free transfers regardless rule went into effect in 2024. We’ve never going back to the old way.
Florida will continue to have must-keep players like Jadan Baugh, Brown, Dallas Wilson, and Woods. It will also continue to have players like Tre Wilson and Boireau who the staff would like to keep but won’t pull out all the stops to do so because of resource constraints.
The march of the future has been uneven around the country, but it has finally fully reached Gainesville.