How Oklahoma GM Jim Nagy, Scouting Staff Will Handle January Transfer Portal Window

The Sooners hope to still be playing football in January.

Oklahoma jumped to No. 8 in the newest edition of the College Football Playoff rankings, released Tuesday, after beating Alabama 23-21 on Saturday. If the season ended now, OU would host No. 9 Notre Dame in the first round of the CFP.

While the majority of OU coach Brent Venables’ focus needs to be on winning the final two regular-season games to send his team to the CFP, the Sooners can’t ignore something major looming on the horizon: the opening of the transfer portal window.

For the first time, the transfer portal will have a one-time window. It will open on Jan. 2 and close on Jan. 16. The College Football Playoff semifinals will be played right in the middle of that window, on Jan. 8 and 9.

The good news for Venables? He now has a support staff that can handle matters related to retention and talent acquisition.

Oklahoma hired Jim Nagy to be the Sooners’ general manager earlier this year. Nagy brought with him a scouting staff that includes former NFL front-office personnel.

“There’s a lot of work that they do on a daily basis to put us in a great position, where we want to be, whether that’s evaluation of the current roster, certainly anticipating whatever losses there are to graduation and things of that nature,” Venables said on the SEC’s weekly teleconference on Wednesday. “They’ve done a wonderful job up to this point.”

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Last year, Oklahoma landed dozens of players from the transfer portal. Some of the standouts that the Sooners landed from the portal include quarterback John Mateer, wide receiver Isaiah Sategna, defensive end Marvin Jones Jr. and linebacker Kendal Daniels.

In the current era of college football, coaches and front offices are tasked with replacing sizable gaps left from players transferring. A year ago, the Sooners had to find replacements for quarterback Jackson Arnold, wide receivers Nic Anderson and Andrel Anthony, tight end Bauer Sharp, linebacker Lewis Carter and several other key players.

Venables previously said that Oklahoma’s coaching staff still plays a role in evaluating talent alongside Nagy’s scouting team. But the coach believes that Nagy and his staff will be effective in finding the right talent in the portal — and that it will allow him to allocate most of his focus toward making a CFP run.

“That’s one of the many layers of support that they’ll provide,” Venables said. “Being able to bridge that gap, doing a lot of things from the strategy standpoint that they’ve been working on for the last several months, identifying what the needs are, all of those types of things.”

It’s worth noting that teams still in the College Football Playoff will be granted an additional five-day portal window after the completion of their final game. And if Oklahoma finds itself in that situation, portal frenzy will have already begun across the nation.

Still, Venables is confident that Nagy’s first one-time window of evaluation will be a successful one.

“It certainly allows you to focus on the things that matter the most right now,” Venables said. “I think, from a retention standpoint, we’re working on that, and I think every coach on the staff is every single day, just naturally, organically, through your relationships built on the right stuff — trust and respect and certainly opportunity.”