Iowa football’s 2023 involvement in transfer portal is ‘hard to predict’ as first window opens

IOWA CITY — Iowa football’s transfer portal shopping trends have changed in recent years.

After the 2021 season, Iowa’s transfer portal shopping metaphorically resembled someone in the express checkout line at a grocery store. The Hawkeyes added one FCS-level player, and that was it.

After the 2022 season, it was more analogous to a Black Friday spending spree. Iowa added a former starting quarterback from a College Football Playoff team, the ACC’s leader in tackles per game and a former Ohio State wide receiver, among others.

The 2023 transfer portal shopping season began Monday with the opening of the first transfer portal window, and it is unclear how active of shoppers the Hawkeyes will be.

“How will it go this year? It’s hard to predict,” Iowa Coach Kirk Ferentz said in a Zoom news conference on Sunday.

Last year, Iowa went into the first transfer portal window with “some indication of what our roster is going to shake out to be.” It was partly because the Hawkeyes did not have a Big Ten championship game to prepare for before the portal opened.

“A year ago at this time, we had already met with our players,” Ferentz said. “We met with them the week after Thanksgiving and just talked to each and every one about their futures, what they are thinking about.”

But this year, Iowa’s focus unsurprisingly “was solely on the championship game.”

“As you might imagine last week, that really wasn’t appropriate to talk to players about what they were thinking,” Ferentz said.

The Hawkeyes will still approach the portal “pretty much the same way as last year,” albeit with a bit of a delay.

“We'll meet as a staff tomorrow morning and just talk jointly about the roster,” Ferentz said. “And then we'll go through the process again — touching base with all of our players through the next two days.”

Ferentz estimated the staff will have “a little bit better idea of what our roster is going to shape up like” by the end of this week.

“From then, we'll have a better idea of how we can move forward, too, in terms of looking in the portal and seeing of what might be of interest to us.”

Iowa’s transfer portal foray in 2022 was partially out of necessity.

Before the official portal window opened last year, three prominent offensive players — running back Gavin Williams and wide receivers Keagan Johnson and Arland Bruce IV — had already announced plans to transfer.

“Last year it made more sense to be active than the year before,” Ferentz said.

Fast-forward to 2023, and backup defensive back Brenden Deasfernandes was the lone player to announce plans to transfer before Monday’s window began. (Deasfernandes mostly contributed on special teams this season.)

That comes with an asterisk, though. Iowa’s trip to the Big Ten championship game surely accounted for some of the difference between 2022 and 2023. Any athlete who left the team last week would have missed out on the opportunity to compete for a conference championship.

The NCAA first instituted transfer portal windows in 2022. The windows dictate when an athlete must enter the portal, but an athlete does not necessarily need to commit during the designated time periods. Exceptions are in place for athletes who already graduated or are at a school that changed head coaches.

The NCAA also does not preclude players from announcing their plans to enter the transfer portal before the official start of the transfer window.

The transfer portal window will be open until Jan. 2 this year. It is often in players’ best interests to enter early because portal players often outnumber portal opportunities.

The NCAA released data from the 2021-22 portal cycle that showed 32 percent of scholarship FBS football players who entered the transfer portal either remained active in the portal or went somewhere without a scholarship.

Ferentz’s desire is for every player to “be happy with their situations.”

“If a guy is not sure he wants to be here or sure he doesn't want to be here, then my encouragement would be to maybe check something else out,” Ferentz said. “We operate better with guys who are really fully invested.”

Comments: john.steppe@thegazette.com