At Inside the League, we’ve been focusing a lot of our attention on the college football transfer portal. We had a widely attended symposium at the NFL Combine and we discussed it in the Scouting the League podcast with guest Oscar Monnier (former portal boss at five P5 schools) last month. It’s one of the hottest topics in the player representation industry, but it’s still mostly a mystery, at least among the bigger agencies.

It’s got me thinking about the fundamentals of the transfer portal, starting with how, exactly, it all works. As near as I can tell, there’s a process.

• Player enters the portal.
• A director or member of the personnel staff, knowing which position(s) the school is targeting, does a preliminary evaluation of the player.
• The personnel staffer submits his evaluation and any game film he can round up to the relevant position coach, who then makes a determination on whether to pursue him. This normally takes less than 24 hours.
• The team decides if the player is worthy of an offer. If the offer is made, a visit is scheduled. 
• At some point, the coaches huddle with the collective (if the school has one) to determine how much money, if any, can be offered.
• Once the player accepts an invitation to visit and shows up on campus, his height and weight are recorded. At the end of the visit, a formal offer is made, often by the head coach, personally. 
• The player is not official with the school until he is enrolled and attends class, by my understanding. 

This led me to more questions. For example, we’ve got a portal window opening in April. It’s a shorter one (only two weeks), but will still be a popular one, I’m sure. How will it work, given that there will only be a few short weeks of school left and no chance for transfers to actually enroll? 

I posed the question to an expert on the process, and his response was: “Spring transfers take summer classes 99% of the time, so that triggers it being finalized. It’s also the worst possible time to transfer, which is a big deterrent on its own, not to mention there’s no portal window for undergrads at that time.”

After a week of speaking to portal specialists at schools big and small, here are a couple more notes and takeaways:

• More progressive schools are using flashy graphics — yes, similar to the ones splashed all over social media when a player gets an offer — to recruit portal players. The only difference is, the schools pass these along via text rather than social media. Like it or not, communicating in this manner is the way to attract today’s top prospects.
• One school has 16 volunteers committed to doing nothing but evaluating players once they hit the portal or preparing their board with players they anticipate entering the portal.
• Some schools with big war chests but limited personnel departments simply wait until players get multiple offers, then make their own. 
• We had several other interesting tidbits in Tuesday’s Rep Rumblings report, including the ratio of dollars spent on retention vs. acquisition for one school, the going rate for a middling QB prospect, how schools of varying size prepare for the portal and more. 

As always, we’ll be chopping it up on the portal and other football business matters in today’s Friday Wrap, which comes out at 7:30 p.m. ET. Register for it here.