College football has changed a lot since Urban Meyer retired from coaching following the 2018 season with players now allowed to transfer freely as many times as they want after a court ruling. And it sounds like Meyer is pleased that he doesn’t have to deal with that.
During a recent interview on The Lou Holtz Podcast, Urban Meyer said that he was a fan of allowing players to transfer freely once they graduated, but he is not a fan of allowing players unlimited transfers.
“The transfer portal was something that I was a big fan of the graduate. Once you fulfilled your obligation as a graduate and you can move on,” Meyer said. “We had great examples where players just weren’t quite good enough at Ohio State, and they went somewhere else and played. They got a great year of football in. I was a fan of that. But then now my understanding is a judge ruled it that now there’s unlimited transfer. You can leave anytime you want, and you can transfer anytime you want. So that was not there.”
Obviously, Meyer does not have to deal with the transfer portal firsthand since he retired from coaching college football back in 2018, but he has heard from some active coaches that the transfer portal makes things quite difficult.
“My colleagues or friends that I speak to say it’s really hard. If I’m a Bowling Green coach, and we do a good job developing a player, they leave the next year and go for someone who’s going to pay them some money. If you’re at a school and you get beat out, you leave. So we won a national champion Championship in 2014 with a third-stream quarterback. Not many teams have third-string quarterbacks anymore. They all leave,” Meyer said.
Things are very different than when Meyer left the sport.
