From two windows and 45 total days down to two windows and 30 days. Now? The NCAA is moving for a single-window Transfer Portal.
Thursday, the NCAA announced that its FBS Oversight Committee had pushed forward with a proposal to have one single Transfer Portal Window.
The measure will be voted on in the coming weeks, with the NCAA indicating a vote due before month's end and multiple college football general managers and personnel executives stressing to FootballScoop that finalizing the date-range and Transfer Portal Window parameters are primary concerns as the college football season enters its second full week.
The Oversight Committee is pushing forward with a plan to have a single window for an open Transfer Portal and a shorter-than-ever timeframe. The NCAA is pushing a 10-day window that would run from Jan. 2-11, 2026. The Oversight group also pushed forward a dramatic change to the recruiting calendar, advocating that the entire month of December become a recruiting dead period while "Jan. 5-31 would remain a recruiting period, when coaches can have contact with or evaluate prospects."
The Portal proposal is a potentially drastic change for what has become de facto player free agency, which debuted earlier this decade with two separate windows -- immediately after the season and again in late spring.
Several college football GMs and personnel executives had told FootballScoop as recently as Thursday morning that they expected a single window but one that was expected to be closer to 20 days in length.
The absence of a spring Portal Window also is expected to be met with resistance from student-athletes and their advocates. Among some of college football's most high-profile Portal movements this year came during the spring session.
That's when Nico Iamaleava exited Tennessee for UCLA and Joey Aguilar, who in January had departed Appalachian State for UCLA, left the Bruins for the Vols.
This proposed window would dramatically reduce the number of teams still active in their seasons. Most bowl games will conclude by New Year's Day, and that's also when the quarterfinals of the 12-team College Football Playoff will be completed.
The four teams left on Jan. 2 are expected to have similar Portal options as last year, when student-athletes had five days following the end of their respective teams's seasons to enter the Portal.
Coaches widely have pushed for a single Portal Window, citing the amount of movement -- and unofficial pre-Portal movement -- as why the sport needs just one transfer session and an abbreviated one at that.
It will be interesting to see if this 10-day proposal is adopted and if it the range is limited to those 10 days and those calendar dates adopted. Multiple general managers told FootballScoop that they favored a single window but one that perhaps spanned the final 10 days of December and the opening of January.
Their logic?
"I don't want to pay a guy -- or several guys -- his rev-share on Jan. 1 -- or even in December -- and have him enter the Portal with our money," a Power Conference GM told FootballScoop.
Added another executive, "If we know we want to encourage someone to move along, we'd rather roll that money forward into next year's roster than spend it on a guy who we know probably won't be here."
One other notable proposal included from the Oversight Committee: barring schools from sending out formal written scholarship offers until mid-November of a prospect's senior year. The current calendar allows those offers to be distributed on Aug. 1 of a prospect's senior season, and in recent years has become something of a phenomenon in the sport -- with schools dueling one another for the most elaborate scholarship offers. For example, this year Colorado sent its recruits trading cards of the prospect as well as binders of trading cards featuring the Colorado coaching staff, highlighted by head coach Deion Sanders.