Transfer portal analytics: How UCF, UF, FSU football apply them and adapt
Geography, experience and even a player’s major are some of the analytics used by college programs to help determine the value of a transfer. “You must make quick decisions,” UCF coach Gus Ma…
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UCF: Ready, set, speed recruit
Unlike high school recruiting, the transfer portal comes with its own set of challenges.“On the high school side you really are taking time to build the relationship and understand the prospect. Whereas in the portal, I mean, one day is an eternity and so it’s a little bit faster and things move quicker.”
UCF has a unique approach to the transfer market that has proven successful.
Under coach Gus Malzahn, the Knights have signed 34 players in three recruiting cycles, including 14 heading into the 2023 season. While analytics do play a role in the process, Malzahn emphasizes the importance of timing.
“You must make quick decisions,” he said. “When somebody goes in the portal, you watch their film. That’s the first step and the second step is finding out about their character and work ethic. You contact their former coaches, etc. For us, that’s very important, the type of person they are.
“It’s recruiting on steroids. You have to make quick decisions, sometimes within 48 hours.”
Coaches aren’t allowed to contact players before they officially enter the portal, but that doesn’t stop recruiting staff members such as Andrew Blaylock from planning ahead. Blaylock, who serves as a special assistant to the head coach at UCF, has been keeping a close eye on the transfer market.
“There are guys going on social media saying they’re hitting the portal as soon as it opens,” he said. “You can’t talk to the kids until they actually go in, but you can start keeping a database of all the guys going in and start breaking down all the film they have. So when they do actually go in the portal, we’re able to communicate with the coaches and say, ‘Hey, such and such is in the portal.’”
Recruiting services also are an important tool for staying ahead of the game. By using these services, UCF is able to gather valuable data and insights that help them make informed decisions.
When a player enters the transfer portal database, only their name, school, whether they are a graduate transfer and whether they are on scholarship are listed. The interested programs must track down everything else, including the player’s position.
“The previous institutions I was at, we didn’t have this recruiting server,” said Blaylock, who spent the previous six seasons at Appalachian State. “So, I had an intern to go through manually input all this. They would go look at the players on the [school’s] pages. They’re looking at positions, they’re looking at height, weight, where they’re from … everything.”
They even had to resort to searching for the players on Hudl or other platforms, especially if their roster page had been removed from the team page. In contrast, UCF uses a recruiting service that breaks down players by position groups and divisions, including FBS, FCS, Division I, II, and III.
“You can even sort by how many snaps they’ve played and whether they’re an all-conference or All-American,” said Blaylock. “That’s been a huge help to us. That makes it even easier for us to go back through and weed out the guys our coaches don’t need to worry about.”
Said Yray: There’s a lot of information out there, more so than there ever has been, especially with the explosion of Hudl Internet, and there are different services out there that we subscribe to. We’re just collecting some of that information and ensuring we understand why that’s happening and studying it.”
UCF has seven full-time members, including Blaylock, in its football recruiting offices with four interns.
“Seven sounds like a lot, but some of these other places have double digits of staff, where they can separate college and high school,” said Blaylock. “It’s all hands on deck with everything. We’re doing everything with the portal now that we can, but we still want to recruit high school athletes. We’ve got to balance it out.”
Blaylock and his staff are in the offices by 6:30 a.m. every day during the fall. One of the first things they do is log into the transfer portal to check out the latest moves. On some days, they wouldn’t leave until 10:30 p.m.
During the first week of the December transfer window, the Gators staff was in the office at 7 a.m. and didn’t leave until 7 p.m. most days.
“It’s all day and sometimes they trickle in more in the morning than the afternoon,” said Sherrill. “That first week, I remember our students were telling us there were 700 entries the first day. This last [window], there were 150.”
The next portal window takes place in December and will remain open for 45 days.
