January 22, 2026
Hey, I hope everybody’s doing well, that your new year is off to a continued strong start. I want to briefly talk about something that’s near and dear to my heart right now. In fact, I believe the football window for the transfer portal has just closed a few days ago.
There are a lot of things right about college sports and there are a lot of things that are wrong about college sports. I think we’ll continue to try and make the appropriate adjustments, but I don’t know how much discourse is going on regarding the transfer Portal and mental health. All right. Some realities are that roughly 20,000 plus kids going to the portal, and probably anywhere between 40 and 50 percent, approximately nine to ten thousand student athletes, never leave the transfer pool. That’s significant for a lot of reasons. First, you do have to understand that transfer portal works both ways. So sometimes student athletes are looking for greener grass, or they’re looking for green money. On the other hand, coaches may have asked them to leave the program. There are a variety of reasons athletes are in the portal.
One of the things that the transfer portal now allows us to see is this previously invisible population of student athletes who fall out of college athletics for one reason or another. Again, I think there’s probably some academic reasons that are related to why kids are in the transfer portal, etc., but what about their mental health?
They have left one school, they’re not eligible for those services and because they have not been accepted into another program as a student athlete, they’re not eligible for mental health services at another school. Now it’s quite possible that part of this population returns to the same university or another university as a student. And I don’t know if there’s data on that. I’ll have to follow through, but. What are we doing for those student athletes?
Just like there are different levels and different reasons why these kids are in the transfer portal there are different mental health implications for them while in the portal…
• Some kids come to us with existing diagnosed and undiagnosed mental health disorder. Right? And that may have impacted the reason that they’re in the transfer portal. You know they didn’t get along with their coach, they were overly aggressive, etc.
• For some, there were issues within the athletic department or at the institution that may have exacerbated an existing mental health condition or created one. For instance, an abusive coach, homesickness, a bad relationship with a coach or teammate, etc.
Theirs is at least one more reason… the creation of the transfer portal:
• some of the way it operates
• the reality some credits will not transfer
• maybe some coaches can bad mouth you
• coaches can make promise that they will recruit take you out of the portal, but don’t
• the emerging lawsuits
• etc., etc., etc.
All of these can lead to depression, anxiety, substance abuse, PTSD and where can athletes, who are impacted by the man-made portal, get help for the mental health issues it exacerbates or causes?
I know that there’s a lot of conversation about transfer portal as it impacts the competitive aspects of the game and issues like recruiting. However, I know that some of the mental health clinicians that I speak with are saying that they’re having to talk to student athletes about transfer portal issues when they are pondering departing their universities/athletic programs
I can only imagine what level of support those athletes who are in the portal, particularly those who will never get out, need to maintain their mental health.
