Yesterday marked the opening of the winter portal window, meaning that teams who made a bowl game are scrambling to both prepare for their postseason opponents, and figure out what their roster will look like in both the short term, and long term.
The only way to get a full scope of where your roster is heading is by having one-on-one meetings with players, something that nearly every coach in the country has been doing as part of their modern end of season process.
In those meetings, coaches and players are discussing the depth chart, how the student athlete fits into future plans, and the two sides also discuss whether it's in one side's best interest to consider testing the waters of the transfer portal.
At Syracuse, with Fran Brown at the helm after a 9-3 debut season that saw the Orange ranked among the top 25 in the country, they've got two ways you can enter the portal.
In the simplest of terms, there's the right way, and the wrong way.
"We are going to have guys go in the portal - some by choice, some by a handshake, some that this just might not be the place as the talent level rises. Our culture is different. You might not fit the culture."
Brown says if his guys are looking to enter the portal, and don't do it the right way, he'll put the "snakes" in the portal himself.
"We are always going to do it the right way. When you don't do it the right way and you start to spread that you are thinking about going into the portal, if I get wind of that, I'm putting you in the portal."
"That's kind of like the motto here. There are some guys that want to go in that want to think out loud. Don't think out loud, just do it the right way. Because if you want to start doing that without coming to talk to us, do it like a man, come and talk to me with your family and maybe we can make it the right way. But if you just start to say that and start to spread that through a team, I think we have a really close team, when one of the brothers on the team is spreading 'I'm about to do this, I'm about to do that,' in a negative way, to me you are a snake and I don't want to be around a snake."
"You start being a snake, what do you have to do with a snake? You have to cut it by the head, otherwise it won't die. As soon as you say you want to go and being sneaky running around telling everybody, I'm going to make sure you stand on what you say."
Hear Fran's full thoughts in the clip.