How transfer portal forces adaptation — and wreaks havoc — at Georgia Southern

STATESBORO ― When Troy Pikes came to his coach, Georgia Southern’s Clay Helton, last April and revealed the money he’d been offered to play football at South Carolina, Helton didn’t try to talk him out of it.

The Eagles lacked the resources to counter, and Pikes was due to get what Helton calls a “highest value” deal based on his position and eligibility status. A defensive tackle who would go on to make 16 tackles in a reserve role this season with the Gamecocks, he had three seasons left to play.

So Helton offered instead to introduce Pikes to a financial advisor to assist in investing his earnings to make the money last.

“I hope guys stay here the whole time, I really do, but that’s not the reality of the world we live in,” Helton said. “We put great value on trust and relationships, and that means you have to do right by your guys, no matter what.”

Credit: Sarah Peacock

Credit: Sarah Peacock

The creation of the transfer portal and the legalization of compensating players for their talents is reshaping college sports. Perhaps no schools are feeling the effect more than Georgia Southern and its peers in the lowest-profile football-playing conferences: the Sun Belt, Mid-American and Conference USA.

The game’s powers cherry-pick the best players, such as Georgia Southern’s Marques Watson-Trent, the 2024 Sun Belt Defensive Player of the Year who made 35 tackles in four starts this year at Nebraska. And Tennessee star quarterback Joey Aguilar, formerly of the Sun Belt’s Appalachian State, and Texas A&M pass rusher Cashius Howell, who started his career at the MAC’s Bowling Green.

Wannabe great programs woo those with great potential, as happened with Pikes and South Carolina, not to mention Heisman Trophy runner-up Diego Pavia, who played for Conference USA’s New Mexico State before transferring to Vanderbilt.

Credit: AP

Credit: AP

Georgia Southern has fared better than its peers, losing just four projected returning starters in the transfer portal ahead of this season. All left for major conference programs. In 2024, only two Eagle starters, plus a kicker and long snapper, transferred.

With the 2026 transfer portal set to open Jan. 2, just four days after the Eagles’ appearance against Appalachian State in the Birmingham Bowl, Helton is hopeful the atmosphere he’s fostered once again stems departures.

“You can either be frustrated with the situation or you can adapt,” Helton said. “We’ve adapted because that’s what good programs that want to be as competitive as they can be do.”

‘Godfather offers’ are the exception, not the rule

Talk to Matt Varnadoe, and you’ll realize the general public is as ignorant about the transfer portal as they are the intricacies of pass coverages and blocking schemes.

Varnadoe is Georgia Southern’s rules compliance guru. His formal title is senior associate athletics director for governance and strategic initiatives, and he was in a similar job when the transfer portal was first introduced in 2018. He’s adapted as the portal’s evolved in the years since.

Credit: Sarah Peacock

Credit: Sarah Peacock

At its core, Varnadoe said, the portal merely altered the transfer process by allowing student-athletes to talk to other schools without seeking their current school’s permission. The portal also removed the school’s ability to block a transfer. And as of 2020, transferring players no longer have to sit out a year at their new school, as was long the case in football, men’s and women’s basketball, baseball and men’s hockey.

But what’s more misunderstood than the basics, he said, is that players transferring for compensation — “godfather offers” as he calls it — are few.

“When fans talk about the portal, they put too much attention on the high-profile players looking to make money,” he said. “For the vast majority, that’s not the primary motivation.”

The most cited reasons include playing time promises, brand attraction or moving to a school that’s closer to home. It’s transactional, just not financial. And it is rampant.

Roster raiding hits other Eagle sports hard

Varnadoe need only look around his own campus for evidence.

The Eagles football team may have avoided roster raiding in recent years, but the school’s other programs haven’t. The most impacted include the men’s basketball team, which returned just one player from last year’s roster, and the women’s golf team, an NCAA Championship finalist last year that saw four starters and its top alternate transfer to higher-profile schools.

Only two of the basketball transfers left for significantly more money and only one, Adante’ Holiman, the Sun Belt’s leading scorer last season, went to a major conference program in Arizona State. Three of the other five transfers are not on NCAA rosters this season.

Hoops coach Charlie Henry has made peace with the process. The third-year coach is leaning into the challenge of “building the best team you can each year.” College basketball was a transient game even before the portal’s advent, he acknowledges, with more than 360 Division I programs seeking talent.

Now all are allowed to offer player compensation, making it more difficult to retain proven performers, such as Holiman.

The Eagles are 10-5 and winners of seven straight games heading into the new year — with three transfers Henry recruited following last year’s end-of-season exodus leading them in scoring.

As for women’s golf, the sport is not a place of “godfather deals.” Coach Mimi Burke saw her four would-be top returnees parlay their NCAA Championship success into scholarships at higher-profile programs Texas A&M, Alabama, Ole Miss and Kansas State.

The transfers happened well after the typical recruiting cycle, forcing Burke to restock her roster with Division II transfers and another from the University of Denver. Burke declined an interview request. The Eagles posted a top-five finish in just one tournament this fall after winning six tourneys last season.

The transfer portal has changed the way collegians approach their college playing careers, said Georgia Southern basketball’s Tyren Moore. He left the Eagles following the 2023-2024 to play at Alabama-Birmingham only to transfer back for this season once he realized “the grass wasn’t greener” at UAB.

“Now there’s almost nothing you can do if a guy has this mindset on going somewhere else or trying to explore options elsewhere,” he said. “It’s almost like college basketball, college sports in general, is just a business nowadays.”

Georgia Southern’s competitiveness in college athletics’ top ranks depends on the ability to become a bigger player in that business while also giving its top talent reason beyond money to stay in Statesboro. The football team, at least, is finding success — several players who would have commanded higher pay in the transfer portal last season chose to stay with the Eagles, according to Georgia Southern officials.

Athletic Director Chris Davis said Georgia Southern’s reputation for “pouring into student-athletes everything we can for them to be successful” is bringing results.

“If we do that and they get an opportunity that’s just game changing for them and where they feel like it’s a better fit, we have to support them because everybody has the ability to talk about their experience with Georgia Southern,” he said. “And we care about the type of experience we provide here.”