DETROIT — In recent years, it has become more and more challenging to be a college football head coach.
Gone are the days of recruiting players and coaching them up for four or five years. Instead, the sport finds itself in an era of unprecedented player movement thanks to the transfer portal quickly facilitating moves between NCAA institutions with few restrictions.
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Widespread tampering under the guise of name, image and likeness (NIL) deals has only exacerbated such movement. While schools and coaches can’t directly recruit players from other teams, there are no rules preventing independent NIL collectives from negotiating with agents and making offers to players to enter the portal. This has created a system where the top players in the NCAA’s non-autonomous conferences (Group of 5) are often poached by teams in autonomous conferences (Power 4).
The Mid-American Conference is in the former group, seeing its top talent migrate up to the Power 4 level more frequently over the last few years. Of the 11 players on the 2024 All-MAC first-team who retained eligibility for 2025, only two will return to their 2024 teams. Meanwhile, eight of the nine who transferred wound up at Power 4 schools.
This new era raises plenty of questions. How can the coaches of the MAC best respond and adapt to the constant roster turnover? Does the constantly looming threat of the portal affect locker rooms during the season? How understanding are players when their teammates move on? Well, like almost everything else, it varies from school to school.
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Coaches emphasize culture, relationships
Perhaps the most eventful transfer portal season among the MAC belongs to Ball State. Exactly half of its roster — 55 out of 110 players — is new this season, and new head coach Mike Uremovich replaced almost the entire staff with his own guys. With more new faces than old, it’s been easier for everyone to get on the same page as the program begins a new era.
“The new guys who came in and the guys who were returning, it was all new to them, so they were all going through it for the first time.” Uremovich said. “It’s fun to watch that all coming together, and then you have the new crop of guys that comes in May and June and high school guys, so we’ve got to get those guys bought in too.”
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The Cardinals are one of six teams in the MAC who will have a new coach this season. This group includes the reigning MAC champion Ohio Bobcats, as former offensive coordinator Brian Smith will take over the head coaching post from Tim Albin, who took the Charlotte job mere hours after the MAC title game.
Despite Albin’s stunning move and the fact that he took a slew of assistant coaches with him, Ohio only lost a handful of players to the portal. The Bobcats have also had success recruiting from the portal, as many of the key contributors to their conference championship victory were former transfers.
“When you really emphasize the culture within your program and that gets built among the players that are in it, and you are constantly emphasizing it within your team, the new players are going to be able to adapt to that culture, or they’re not going to work out,” Smith said. “We’ve done a good job of identifying kids that we think fit what we do from a program standpoint, but also culturally.”
Another team with limited roster turnover this offseason was Buffalo. The Bulls had the MAC’s least active portal period in terms of both transfers out and in, and they were one of the two teams to retain a 2024 first-team All-MAC player with linebacker Red Murdock. Going into his second season as the head coach, Pete Lembo takes pride in the Bulls’ limited movement and cited the program’s emphasis on relationships as a key factor in the continuity.
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“I think the best way to overcome those (challenges) is to do what we’ve always done, which is build great relationships,” Lembo said. “The reason I got into coaching 30-plus years ago was because I enjoyed the relationships, player-to-player, coach-to-player, the staff, the administration, and those things haven’t changed.”
Of course, not every team in the conference was as fortunate as Ohio and Buffalo. Eastern Michigan, for example, has 50 new players this season. Twelfth-year coach Chris Creighton — tied for the longest tenured head coach in the MAC — remembers a time before the conference was ravaged by the portal and has had to adapt to its new landscape. Creighton believes that his adaptation has been made easier by the fact that his team culture is firmly solidified with his decade-plus of experience with the Eagles.
“Our guys know who they are, so we can recruit to that,” Creighton said. “We’re not trying to figure out who we are, we’re not trying to establish who we are. That’s what we want to continue to be really strong in, is knowing who we are and having a certain culture.”
No hard feelings among players
While one might expect constant roster turnover and NIL negotiations to create animosity or jealousy within a locker room, the players of the MAC are generally understanding. Most players get the “business decision” nature of their teammates who opt for the portal, and those who stick around know they need to rally around the next man up.
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“We’re not going to dwell on who’s not here,” said Eastern Michigan defensive lineman Jefferson Adam. “You know, best of luck to them, but we’re just building off what we have because that’s ultimately what’s most important.”
Players who do decide to stay often play a role in convincing others to do the same. For coaches who now have to worry about re-recruiting their own players, having players who can do it for them is a big advantage.
“For a head coach, it’s one of your biggest jobs to recruit your own roster,” Western Michigan coach Lance Taylor said. “Your own players can be a huge part of that because honestly, those are the guys that they battle with every single day. They live with them, they hang out with them, they have really close and deep relationships.”
Those relationships don’t expire when players do decide to leave. Adam, a former Iowa State transfer, is still in touch with some of his Cyclones teammates. Ohio quarterback Parker Navarro spent his first two seasons at UCF, where he met two friends who he remained close enough with to be in each of their weddings recently. Ball State defensive tackle Darin Conley is still close with many of the former Cardinals who left this offseason and continues to support them in their new destinations.
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“You’ve got to remember these guys were our teammates,” Conley said. “We’ve been through thick and thin, they just happened to go somewhere they thing was a benefit for them. You can’t really hate or knock them for that. With the guys who transferred, we’re still close friends. A lot of guys still hang out with each other because we still kind of live close.
“They’re still our guys, and we’re still going to love them. They’re just not currently our teammates.”
The Mid-American Conference football championship trophy at the MAC Football Kickoff media day.
Contact Cade Hampton via email at cbhampton@muncie.gannett.com or on X, formerly known as Twitter, @CadeHamp10.
This article originally appeared on Muncie Star Press: How MAC football has shifted in the NIL and transfer portal era
