The NCAA transfer portal opens Friday for college football players, who will have a 15-day window of opportunity to officially make themselves available for other programs.
It’s another step in roster construction for the 2026 season after last month’s early signing period for recruits from the high school ranks (there’s another period for unsigned prospects ahead next month), but as the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga showed between the 2024 and 2025 seasons, portal season is a much busier time for some teams than others.
In the most recent offseason, no Football Championship Subdivision program not making a coaching change lost more players to the higher-tier Football Bowl Subdivision than UTC’s 13. The Mocs also lost multiple players to fellow FCS programs, including All-Southern Conference first-team running back Reggie Davis (Alcorn State) and starting offensive lineman Almarion Crim (2024 semifinalist South Dakota).
That’s not expected to be the case this time around for the Mocs, who are coming off a 2025 season in which they went 5-7 overall and 4-4 in Southern Conference play, but Rusty Wright — for whom 2026 will be his eighth season as head coach — and his staff will have to deal with some attrition.
Worth noting is that since the most recent offseason, the NCAA has both removed the spring window and approved a single winter window for college football players to enter the portal, changes that should cut down on some of the chaos that UTC dealt with ahead of last season.