Suggests all the early offseason talk was no more than that. Just talk.
It's hard to reconcile because things kicked off with so much hope and optimism. You had David Shaw and Bernard Muir discussing internal changes at Stanford to better utilize the portal moving forward.
Then all of a sudden we land our first transfer portal prospect, LB Gaethan Bernadel, who just so happens to be our first undergrad transfer prospect in over 10 years (the last being TE Konrad Reuland I believe).
A few weeks later we land another undergrad transfer, RB Justin Williams-Thomas. His commitment ultimately didn't stick but the positive vibes of landing a transfer prospect from SEC country was a victory in and of itself.
Troy Taylor gets hired, discusses being more active in the transfer portal at his opening presser, and low & behold a bunch of our coaches are now following dozens of players in the transfer portal. Things were really beginning to look up and for the first time in years and I had genuine hope that meaningful changes were coming to the program to restore the competitive balance at Stanford.
And then... nothing.
No more transfers. Justin Williams-Thomas flips to Cal over an alleged housing issue. And all the players that were being followed closely by multiple coaches and recruiters chose to go elsewhere. When transfer players at enormous positions of need like DT Etinosa Reuben (whose little brother is on the team) or DB Cam'Ron Kelly pick schools in the ACC over Stanford such as Virginia and Georgia Tech, that's one thing. But when you start losing guys like LB Julien Simon to Tulsa or QB Sam Huard to Cal Poly, it becomes harder to comprehend.
Whether this is an admissions-related problem or a recruiting problem, the point remains; things aren't getting any better according to the early returns. Given the vast array of transfer portal players on our coaching staff's radar, I thought for sure we'd pull in a good 2-3 other FBS transfers besides Bernadel. Even Shaw himself said that if we could get 5-6 players annually, that would be a big win for this program. Instead, we sit here today with just ONE FBS transfer. Yes, I recognize that we also nabbed Mayberry and Bank from the Ivies but that's such an enormous jump in competition that it's not realistic to expect them to be instant contributors (let alone at a high level).
With just one FBS transfer on the roster, we now have the same amount of transfers that we did last year (Fields). And two years before that (Sanders). In other words, the one-way portal is still a one-way portal. And as long as things keep trending in that direction, I really do believe that this football program will eventually wither away and die. I sincerely hope there's more reason for optimism than the early returns suggest but I am struggling to find any.
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