The transfer portal’s hidden impact on college football recruiting: What about

Chuck Martin saw it coming because it had already almost happened. In December, kicker Graham Nicholson entered the transfer portal for a day, but the Lou Groza Award winner pulled back after the Miami (OH) staff convinced him to stay. Bigger wasn’t necessarily better. Until bigger returned in the spring portal window. And this time there was no talking Nicholson out of it.

The nation’s best kicker will play his final season at arguably college football’s best program. Nicholson committed to Alabama on April 21, barely 48 hours after entering the transfer portal again.

“Welcome to the food chain,” Martin said.

Nicholson is the latest example of a college football trend that has reshaped how elite programs recruit specialists, draining opportunities for high school kickers in the process. Prospects who train with specialists like Chris Sailer or Jamie Kohl at national showcases now work with the knowledge that schools like Notre Dame, Alabama and Georgia probably won’t be watching. They don’t need to, not when college football can be its own recruiting pool — just with better tape and a more certain return on investment.

Alabama, Georgia and Notre Dame all took transfer kickers this offseason. The Irish have done it in three consecutive cycles, landing Mitch Jeter (South Carolina) after Spencer Shrader (USF) and Blake Grupe (Arkansas State). Michigan, Ohio State, Oregon and Tennessee have all landed a scholarship kicker from the portal during the past three years. Ole Miss and Texas A&M have landed two.

“If you’re a school that’s a ‘have’ and a school that’s got the ability to use NIL to augment their recruiting, there’s a lot of good reasons to just sit back and watch,” said Buffalo head coach Pete Lembo. “Allow a guy to grow and develop somewhere else and then hopefully be able to attract him at a later point in his career when he’s already well-established as a high-end college player.”

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Lembo spent the previous four years as South Carolina’s special teams coordinator, developing Jeter from a kickoff specialist as a freshman and sophomore into a kicker who made 23-of-25 field goals as a junior and senior. When it came time for Jeter to depart, Lembo had been through enough transfer windows to understand it. Jeter graduated from South Carolina on time and Lembo ultimately left for the head coaching job at Buffalo.

When Jeter reached out to Shrader and Grupe for the backstory on the Irish, he liked what he heard. Grupe parlayed one season in South Bend into an opportunity with the New Orleans Saints. Shrader hopes to find similar NFL success after leveling up from the American Athletic Conference to Notre Dame’s national schedule.

“I really just felt like I wanted a little bit of a change of scenery,” Jeter said. “And Notre Dame kind of really stood out to me…