Brian Kelly cautions against teams that over-utilize NCAA transfer portal: ‘That’s a red flag’

As college programs continue to get a better handle on the NCAA transfer portal, at least some football coaches think there are some identifiable markers of programs that aren’t yet ready to compete for national titles.

Brian Kelly and his LSU squad would have been one of the teams wearing those markers in 2022, though the Tigers put together an excellent 10-win campaign in Kelly’s first season in charge.

But Kelly pointed out LSU is attempting to creep closer to what he views as the long-term, sustainable approach when it comes to transfer portal usage. In the interim, before then, the transfer portal is a key tool to rebuilding rosters and helping at least narrow the major talent gap that exists between the likes of programs like Alabama and Georgia and many of their Southeastern Conference peers.

“There’s a gap there. When you’re taking 10, 11, 12 transfers from the portal, that’s a red flag,” Kelly said on the Paul Finebaum Show on Thursday. “You need to be developing your players. You need to be doing it through freshmen that are in your program, developing the process.

“And certainly we’re not there yet. We’re going to get there. We didn’t take a lot of transfers on the offensive side of the ball because we’re further along offensively, quite frankly. Defensively we still have a way to go in terms of recruiting and developing our players.”

The number of transfers has varied widely from school to school.

Some programs in the conference like Arkansas have had in the neighborhood of 30 players depart this offseason. The Razorbacks have backfilled a lot of that with transfers in. Other programs like Georgia haven’t utilized it nearly as much. Notably, Georgia didn’t take a single transfer in prior in 2022 prior to winning the national title.

Red flags or markers aside, Kelly thinks LSU can soon be in a position to rely on transfers less.

“I like what we’ve done in the transfer portal,” Kelly said “We’ve been very strategic. We’ve taken kids that have identified LSU as, in some instances, their dream school but weren’t recruited by LSU. I think that’s helped us in a lot of ways.

“Then having success last year’s been really good because we’ve been able to obviously upgrades some of the players on the defensive side of the ball because they want to play here at LSU.”

As of the time of this writing, LSU had taken 12 players in from the transfer portal during the current cycle, while 19 transfers have exited the program.

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