College football has operated like a neighborhood where everyone knows who’s breaking the rules, nobody calls the cops, and the cops’ phone goes straight to voicemail anyway. The transfer portal era accelerated all of it — the tampering, the back-channel recruiting, the agents texting coaches before a kid has even decided he’s leaving. It became an open secret. And the NCAA responded the way it always does: slowly, vaguely, and with the enforcement energy of a hall monitor at a school with no detention policy.
That might actually be changing. This week brought a wave of developments from the NCAA that, taken together, represent the most serious attempt at reordering college football’s offseason landscape in years. There’s a penalty proposal with real teeth. There’s a memo from enforcement leadership that doesn’t mince words. And there are calendar changes on the horizon that will reshape how programs build rosters, run practices, and even open their seasons.
Let’s walk through all of it — because there’s a lot happening, and it all matters.
The Penalty Proposal: This Is Not a Slap on the Wrist
On Wednesday, the NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision Oversight Committee formally recommended emergency legislation targeting one of the portal era’s most persistent headaches: schools adding transfer players who never formally entered the January portal window.
Here’s the loophole the proposal is trying to close. The transfer portal is a formal system — players have to enter it during a designated window to be eligible to be recruited by other programs. But a player can simply unenroll from their current school as a regular student and re-enroll at another institution outside of that window. No portal. No rules. Just a guy withdrawing from one school and showing up at another. It’s called “blind transferring,” and while the NCAA has frowned on it, there have been essentially no consequences to stop it.
The proposal would change that immediately if approved at the Division I Cabinet meeting in April. The penalties are stacked and they hit hard at multiple levels simultaneously:
The head coach would be prohibited from all football-related duties for six games — that means no recruiting calls, no on-field coaching, no team meetings, nothing. Six games. For context, that’s more than a third of a regular season for most programs. An Alabama or Ohio State losing their head coach for the first six games isn’t just embarrassing — it could derail a championship run before October arrives.
The school would be fined 20% of its football budget. Power Four programs regularly operate football budgets north of $50 million. Do the math: that’s a $10 million-plus fine at the high end. For smaller programs, the proportional damage is arguably worse — facilities, staff, recruiting resources, all gutted. Mark Alnutt, chair of the oversight committee and athletics director at Buffalo, put it plainly: “We felt this was appropriate to place an emphasis on this rule with where we are in Division I football.”
And then there’s the piece that makes lawyers uncomfortable: the program loses five roster spots for the following season, regardless of whether the head coach who made the call is still employed there. That’s institutional accountability in a way the NCAA has rarely enforced before. A new coach inherits the sins of his predecessor. Before signing any contract going forward, every incoming head coach should probably be demanding a full portal compliance audit from their new athletic department.
CBS Sports noted these proposed penalties, in combination, could be “beyond the actual death penalty” in real-world program impact. That’s not hyperbole when you run the numbers.
Our take: these are exactly the right penalties on paper. The question has never been whether the NCAA can write good-sounding rules — it’s whether those rules survive contact with reality. The first time a program faces a six-game coach suspension, there will be an injunction filed faster than a transfer commitment drops on social media. The legal landscape around player eligibility has already swallowed multiple NCAA enforcement attempts whole. Whether this one holds up in court is genuinely uncertain. But the direction is correct.
Jon Duncan’s Memo: The NCAA Is Putting It in Writing
Separate from the formal penalty proposal — but very much part of the same week — came a two-page memo that NCAA Vice President of Enforcement Jon Duncan sent to Division I schools on February 23rd. This one didn’t come through a committee vote. It came from enforcement leadership directly, and the language inside it is unusually straightforward for an organization not known for directness.
Duncan’s memo stated that the Division I Board of Directors has formally directed enforcement staff to pursue significant penalties for tampering violations — and, critically, to begin publicizing resolved cases more broadly. That second part is important. For years, the NCAA’s enforcement process has played out over months or years, often wrapping up long after the guilty party had already graduated, transferred again, or simply moved on. Naming names publicly in real time changes the social and reputational stakes for programs in ways that a quiet internal ruling never does.
The memo also defined tampering in unusually specific terms. “Communications of any kind are not permitted with a student-athlete at another school — or any other representatives of their interests, including agents — before that student-athlete enters the NCAA Transfer Portal,” Duncan wrote. A coach expressing interest in a player. A booster suggesting a roster spot might open up. An agent continuing a conversation after initial contact. All of it counts. All of it is now explicitly on the record as a violation the NCAA says it intends to prosecute.
Duncan also announced an “infractions modernization task force” — a working group involving NCAA enforcement staff, hearing operations, and governance personnel — charged with speeding up how cases are resolved. The stated goal is to move from the multi-year investigation timelines that have defined the modern era to something closer to real-time accountability. Whether an organization with the NCAA’s historical processing speed can actually pull that off is a separate question, but the intent is clearly stated.
The timing of all this is not coincidental. Clemson head coach Dabo Swinney went public in January accusing Ole Miss head coach Pete Golding of tampering involving linebacker Luke Ferrelli — calling it “a whole other level of tampering” and filing a formal grievance. Fresno State then submitted screenshots of alleged contact violations between Ole Miss and receiver Josiah Freeman. The pressure built publicly. The memo followed. Whether Dabo Swinney gets the outcome he wanted is still unknown, but it’s hard to argue he didn’t move the needle.
Calendar Changes: Week Zero, Spring Flexibility, and a Stable Portal Window
Beyond the enforcement news, the Oversight Committee also discussed significant changes to the college football calendar itself. These don’t have the same headline punch as six-game suspensions, but they could have an equally large impact on how programs operate day to day.
First: the January transfer portal window is staying in January. There was genuine debate earlier this offseason about whether to shift the window back to the spring. The committee settled firmly on keeping it where it is. The logic: coaches need roster clarity before spring ball begins. Having a clean 15-day window in January — even if it awkwardly overlapped with the College Football Playoff this year — gives programs a defined endpoint before spring practice starts. That’s valuable even when it’s inconvenient.
Second: coaches could gain flexibility to move spring practices into the summer. This proposal, originally championed by the American Football Coaches Association, would give coaches additional contactless OTA-style workouts in May and June on top of their current 15 spring practices. One version floated would allow coaches to spread 21 total practices across two distinct windows: a traditional spring block in February through April, and a summer block in late May and June. For programs installing new systems or integrating a heavy portal class, that additional time is genuinely valuable. It also gives players who arrive late in the portal cycle more time to get up to speed before fall camp.
Third: Week Zero could become standard starting in 2027. Currently, playing in Week Zero requires the NCAA to grant a specific waiver (Hawaii gets an automatic exemption). The proposal would open Week Zero broadly, giving conferences and schools more scheduling flexibility and handing fans more college football earlier in the calendar. From a pure viewership standpoint, there is no downside here. More college football is more college football. The logistical and competitive fairness questions around early-starting schedules are real, but they’re solvable.
What It All Actually Means
Taken together, this week’s developments represent something the NCAA hasn’t managed in a while: a coherent, multi-pronged message that it understands the problem and has at least attempted to match the solution to the scale of the issue.
The Cincinnati situation is worth mentioning as a preview of where all this gets complicated. The university is currently suing its former quarterback Brendan Sorsby after he transferred to Texas Tech, claiming he breached an NIL contract that included a reported $1 million buyout clause. Sorsby reportedly landed a $5 million deal to play his final season in Texas. That case is headed to court, and it represents exactly the kind of legal complexity that emerges when the transfer ecosystem intersects with money at this scale. The same legal energy will show up the moment the NCAA tries to enforce its new penalties on a program with resources and lawyers.
The NCAA has the right idea. The proposals are serious. The memo is direct. The calendar changes reflect genuine feedback from coaches and administrators. The real test isn’t whether this passes in April — it’s whether it’s still standing after the first school files for an injunction, which history strongly suggests is coming.
College football has never been especially good at governing itself. But for the first time in a long time, it at least looks like the people writing the rules understand what the actual problem is. That’s not nothing. It’s a start. Whether it becomes more than that depends on what happens next spring when the first case lands on someone’s desk and the NCAA has to decide whether it really means what it said.
We’ll be watching.
Trusted By Programs Across The Country
