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Night Light | Primed Portals

Night Light | Primed Portals

Reed Duchscher
September 08, 2023

Deion Sanders is the future of coaching in the social media + NIL era

College football might forever be changing. We’ve seen the shakeup in the Power Five, with the PAC 12 going away next year, the SEC and Big Ten gaining a lot of traction, and teams switching conferences. One thing I don’t think people are paying much attention to is how the transfer portal is completely changing college sports.

It’s allowing players to have a second life. Teams can go from 1 win seasons like Colorado to having a team that looks pretty good on the field beating TCU in convincing form. They did this with 86 new players who came in to the 2023 season. Since its inaugural year, the number of players entering the portal has doubled to almost 9,000 players. I don’t see this trend slowing down in the coming years. Coaches now have to deal with incoming high school students entering the portal, securing NIL deals/money for players, and retaining talent who want to transfer schools.

Another layer to this is NIL deals and how well Coach Prime and players have taken over social media. Aside from players’ social handles on jerseys, you can find Travis Hunter’s show 12talks on the Bleacher Report App. The amount of leverage that players have now is going to make college recruiting interesting in the next couple of years.