What’s your take?
Hello, lovely Tomahawk Nation readers.
I was eavesdropping on a private discussion between our writers Jon Marchant and Matt Minnick* and, as a present to you all, I decided to post their private conversation here, without their permission. I’m breaching our cybersecurity measures in the interest of sharing the topic with you all, not just to offer your thoughts here but also to pass around with your loved ones during fesitivities today. Why? So you can take the conversation and ideas, bring them to your family and look smart during your holiday meals with your loved ones, of course. So report back on any ideas offered so we can pass them along to the coaching staff.
*reading our Slack channel
The topic? What, after years of seeing the strategy with it evolve, the best way to approach the portal in 2026 is — whether that’s at Florida State or just generally speaking. The conversation was sparked by the following table from The Athletic, shared by Josh Pick:
Long gone are the days when programs signed roughly 25 high school recruits per year and maybe a couple of junior college transfers. Although high-level high school recruiting still typically predicts the national champion, this year’s College Football Playoff field shows diverse manners of roster construction.
Some teams are built largely like champions of a decade ago, while others have heavily leveraged the transfer portal to fill gaps and/or raise their overall talent level.
Jon Marchant: IMO, only take starters in the portal, and I’ve pretty much changed my tune and believe that the portal is unsustainable long term
Matt Minnick: I really like the multi-year transfers—a guy like Verse, or Benson, or Duce. Sign them to a two-year deal where year two has an escalator based on year 1 incentives.
And I would be including a team win performance incentive in every single NIL deal. Win 10 games, and everyone gets a bonus.
Lower base pay, higher ceiling. Bet on yourselves
Jon Marchant: All good ideas.
Only offering those types of deals would also filter out those guys that want to max their value each year, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but could also hurt you with more talented HS players, no?
Matt Minnick: I don’t know the answer to that. And I would want to get a majority of starters from high school. But ultimately it’s a team sport. Success equals winning as a team and not getting X number of yards.
Jon Marchant: Agree. And I’d have different contracts for HS recruits vs portal guys.
Matt Minnick: Feel like that’s got to be true considering one group has at least proven themselves somewhat at the college level (ideally you aren’t taking a transfer who hasn’t proven anything, right?).
Jon Marchant: Yes. As far as one could take the idea that a portal player with starting exp is more of a known entity.
The interesting thing underpinning all of this is that a lot of player evaluation and recruiting/drafting in college/NFL has quite a bit of luck or lottery component to it. You really never know who will work out and who won’t.
Matt Minnick: That’s spot on about even NFL player eval—the best in the world—is still often a crap shoot. Hence, rookie deals are so much less money and extremely standardized by the players’ association. Essentially, the opposite of the lotto tickets college programs are spending money on.
Jon Marchant: Yup.
One thing I’ve thought about NFL free agency is that if you want to sign that player, it needs to be for exactly what they did for their previous team that you liked. I think it works the same for the transfer portal in college.
Like when the Bucs signed man-cover corner Darrell Revis in FA and then stupidly asked him to play zone exclusively. Don’t do that.
Category: General Sports
