BYU football leads the Big 12 in transfers. Is the portal the Cougars’ best bet for success?

Provo • When BYU football coach Kalani Sitake met with his staff before spring camp this winter, there was a conversation about what to do with the roster. With the Cougars’ move to the Big 12 looming, and a new defensive staff in place, everyone knew there would be some level of roster turnover. BYU needed to add more depth. It needed more front-end talent. It needed a more complete roster, and quickly. So, looking around for immediate help, Sitake gave his coaches, including Jay Hill, Aaron Roderick and Kelly Poppinga, the green light to mine the portal heavily It resulted in 21 transfers, tied for the most in the Big 12, and a method of roster building BYU had been hesitant to embrace fully. “I knew we had to do it this year,” Sitake said. “Jay and A-Rod and K-Pop, they all expressed they wanted to look at our players. See where we are currently in the winter and spring, and then make decisions on how to go forward. This is their team.... I’m the head coach, but I want them to feel like they have their job and they have empowerment.” BYU sits at No. 21 in the nation in this transfer portal class, according to 247Sports. Only Oklahoma and TCU have better transfer classes in the conference. For comparison, BYU’s previous average transfer portal ranking the last five seasons was 71st in the country. So is this just a one-time stopgap to get BYU’s roster Power Five ready, or is this a trend of how BYU will build a roster as a Big 12 member? “I don’t know if it is going to be a trend,” Sitake said. “... I like the guys coming in. I don’t know if it is like, ‘Hey this is the percentage we want in the portal. This is the percentage recruiting from high school.’ I just know, we want to win and we want to win now. And if there is any places we feel like we can improve on, we are going to do it right away.” There is some validity to the idea that this is just what teams do before they jump to the Power Five. The rest of the incoming members of the Big 12 have bolstered their rosters with transfers, hoping to catch up with the depth in the rest of the league too. Houston has 20 transfers this offseason. Cincinnati has 21. UCF has 18. Including BYU, all four incoming members lead the league in the number of transfers. Even TCU, with transfer-heavy head coach Sonny Dykes, only has 13 transfers. So the timing of it, and the ramp up to the Big 12, is part of the equation. But what if this transfer portal becomes more part of BYU’s roster building strategy going forward? There are risks. A revolving door can lead to volatile cycles — especially if the majority of the transfers are one-year rentals. BYU’s transfer quarterback Kedon Slovis falls into that category. “You can’t just leave your team in a bad spot after one year,” Sitake admitted. Roderick, BYU offensive coordinator, shared the same sentiment that earlier this winter. “I think if you go all portal all the time, there is a good chance your team will be pretty up and down from year to year,” he said. “We are trying to have a nice balance there. The majority of our class is going to be high school players. A lot of them are going on missions and they will be good players in a couple of years.” But that balance doesn’t necessarily have to revert back to when BYU was ranked in the 80s nationally in transfer portal classes. Instead, balance can mean bringing in players at a variety of players at different stages in their career. Roderick’s quarterback room is an example. Roderick has spread out his options. He has a one-year transfer rental in Slovis. But he also brought in a transfer with multiple years of eligibility with Jake Retzlaff. And he has the traditional high school recruit in Ryder Burton. It gives BYU a long-term plan and doesn’t force the program to be reliant on one roster construction method or another. That might be a balance BYU wants. “The [portal] in connection with the development of the players we have in our program currently and the missionaries coming in... There is a lot to balance,” Sitake said. At least in the short term, BYU had to go all in on the portal for 2023. It will see new starters at many positions from the portal. But if that level is here to stay, remains to be seen. “If we have to go to the portal to replace somebody because we haven’t developed them or don’t feel great about the depth yet, then we’ll go out... to get somebody,” Sitake said. “Also there are guys in our program that will develop in six months and be ready. I just think you just got to have best talent at every position. And sometimes that [is the portal].”