Bringing Focus to an Overwhelming Transfer Portal Cycle
Down in Austin, Texas, along Caesar Chavez Street, there’s a hotel that has an outdoor area on the banks of the Colorado River overlooking the Congress Avenue bridge.
The location is world famous because as the sun sets on Austin, millions of bats come pour out into the night sky. There are so many coming at you so fast, that you can only see the colony as a whole rather than being able to focus on a single bat.
That’s what it’s been like trying to keep up with the transfer portal these past few weeks. It’s a giant whirlwind of names, photos, schools and rumors flying up out of nowhere at such a high rate that it’s impossible to focus on one for a moment before it’s immediately obscured b by the continuous wave to pours forth out of the transfer portal machine.
While I’m sure to miss a few, I will try to narrow it down to the ones that will most likely affect the Hogs directly.
SPENCER RATTLER, AUSTIN STOGNER TO SOUTH CAROLINA
Normally anything happening in South Carolina as it relates to sports would be off the radar for Razorback fans. Afterall, the Hogs have only played the Gamecocks once in football since 2013.
It also doesn’t help that South Carolina is usually the school you forgot when trying to name all the SEC schools just before you remember Missouri is in the SEC now too. This is because South Carolina has struggled to create an identify in football and men’s basketball. There was a brief flicker under Frank Martin in 2016 when the Gamecocks drug 11 losses to the Final Four, but even then college basketball fans identify that moment more with Martin rather than the Gamecocks.
However, South Carolina drops onto the schedule this year, and despite stretches from 1998-2003 and 2006-2011 where the Hogs went 5-1 against what was then their permanent cross division rivals, the Fighting Roosters of the East Coast will bring national attention as they roll into Fayetteville on the second week of the season carrying some unexpected heavy artillery.
When Rattler, who entered the year as Oklahoma’s starting quarterback and a Heisman front runner, entered the transfer portal, a lot of people assumed he might end up at USC, just not the USC of the SEC.
By the way South Carolina, please stop referring to yourself as USC. It hurts your branding and causes mass confusion because everyone thinks you’re talking about the Trojans of Southern California. That’s their thing. Leave it alone.
Rattler is from California and could have given new head coach Lincoln Riley a quarterback who is familiar with his system while offering Rattler a fresh start in a home environment without the learning curve of learning a new offense.
Stogner, who has been one of the best tight ends in the Big 12 and ranked No. 2 among tight ends coming out of high school, was expected to return home to Texas.
In the end, the chance to play for former Oklahoma assistant head coach/tight ends coach Shane Beamer at South Carolina outweighed the distance it would put between themselves and their families.
DREYDON NORWOOD LEAVES TEXAS A&M
Norwood, who was the top athlete from the state of Arkansas and a top 300 recruit in the 2021 signing class, spent the past year at Texas A&M where the former Fort Smith Northside quarterback/defensive back turned his full attention to the secondary.
After he submitted his name for the portal earlier this week, speculation immediately went to whether he would make his way to Arkansas.
As these signing classes solidify on Wednesday, it will be interesting to see whether he does become a late addition as a transfer.
BO NIX BAILS ON AUBURN, TANK BIGSBY LEAVES, THEN UNLEAVES
No one is entirely sure what is going on at Auburn, but it’s not a good look for head coach Bryan Harsin as he wraps his first year.
He will need to find some new weapons in the transfer portal if he intends to keep the six-game winning streak going against the Razorbacks.
Hog killer Bo Nix, who was last season hitting 81% of his passes for 292 yards and a pair of touchdowns in Arkansas’s most disheartening loss of the year, might rejoin his old coach, Gus Malzahn, down at Central Florida.
Despite the success against the Hogs, Nix had his worst season for passing yards, touchdowns and rushing in his three years on the plains.
Bigsby is coming off a 1,000 yard season, so to lose both he and Nix would have had Auburn fans immediately rekindling their holiday tradition of firing up the old coach’s hot seat.
All-SEC freshman Jarquez Hunter would have stepped into the lead role for Auburn, but the coaching staff managed to talk Bigsby into not leaving by reportedly selling him on a vision of Auburn being more than the 6-6 finish showed.
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