College football 2025 - Transfer portal experience added - ESPN

Arizona State, Indiana and SMU proved it's possible in 2024. If you can make all the right moves in transfer portal recruiting, you can shock the world with a team talented enough to make a run all the way to the College Football Playoff.

Which programs have an opportunity to do the same thing in 2025? Let's dig into the numbers. In this new era of unlimited transfers, the portal is more essential to roster construction than ever before. This offseason, Power 4 programs added more than 13,000 career starts and more than 930,000 career snaps of Division I experience to their rosters via the portal.

As these programs scour the lists of thousands of players who enter the portal in December and April, they're searching for players who bring proven experience. Curt Cignetti won 11 games in his debut season at Indiana by wisely betting on production over potential with the newcomers he built his program around.

«When you've got a guy who's been a two- or three-year starter and has production numbers for three years, to me, there's an intangible factor there,» Cignetti told ESPN last year. «There's something that guy's got that keeps him on the field for 12 games a year for three straight years with good production numbers. I put a premium on those guys that are out there practicing day in and day out, playing game in and game out and producing year in and year out.»

Experienced starters are expensive when they hit the open market. There aren't quite as many sixth-year super seniors returning this fall as the COVID-year players graduate and cycle out, but there were still a ton of veteran players who entered the portal for one extra year of college and NIL earnings rather than enter the draft and try to make an NFL roster or