Texas A&M Football: Transfer Portal Musings and 2022 Thoughts

The Transfer Portal Woes Are Drawing to an End

Sitting here on December 19th, it feels like, for Texas A&M football, the worst is over with regards to the transfer portal.  As I type that, I’m knocking hard on every wood surface within 6 feet or so, but I believe it to be true.

After signing the number one class of all time in the 2022 cycle— breaking the brains of many opposing fans in the process to the point of causing countless baseless allegations of having bought said class— no one in their right mind saw a 5-7 season coming.  In fact, many saw just the opposite— 9, 10, and 11 wins were the common predictions among fans.  This in turn broke the brains of A&M fans to the point of causing many to call for the firing of the coach that has gotten the program to the best place overall it has been in recent memory.

There were a lot of reasons for that 5-7 mark.  This post isn’t meant to detail them all.  It wasn’t all coaching (though some of it was).  It wasn’t all injuries (though some of it was).  It wasn’t all the youth and inexperience on the field (though some of it was).  But coaches change (cough OC hire cough).  Players recover from injury.  The youth and inexperience turn into veterans with experience.  I feel much better about all these factors headed into next year.

But that Texas A&M football team still went 5-7.  And when you notch a record like that, you’re going to have some departures.  Right?

Surprisingly, though, I’m really not sure to what degree that record has actually influenced most of the exits.  Most of the calls for a “mass exodus” of talent from the Texas A&M football program focused on that highly rated 2022 class.  Here are a few examples:

I intentionally included two tweets from the same account in order to illustrate something I think most Texas A&M football fans have sensed this season: the absolutely rabid and vicious desire of opposing fanbases to see the Texas A&M football program gutted of their “ill-gotten” talent.  I’m not going to try and overly psychologize here, but from where I’m sitting, I think a lot of the animus towards the football program came from the claims of the Aggies having bought that record-breaking class.  I’m on record as saying that I think that claim misses the mark: I think the idea that A&M had a decided recruiting advantage in NIL over every other school in the 2022 cycle to the point where it was the deciding factor for many players is one that is lazy, inaccurate, and doesn’t take into account all the evidence.

I’m on record as saying that I think that claim misses the mark: I think the idea that A&M had a decided recruiting advantage in NIL over every other school in the 2022 cycle to the point where it was the deciding factor for many players is one that is lazy, inaccurate, and doesn’t take into account all the evidence.

But again, that’s not what this article is about.

So let’s address this phrase that keeps getting tossed around: “mass exodus.” If we are to evaluate that, we first must establish some type of standard: a benchmark that would qualify transfer portal movement as a mass exodus.  Well, it would have to be a lot of players, obviously.  But it’s not just a lot of players; it’s a lot of contributors.  Let’s take what’s going on at Jackson State as an example; obviously, it’s a bit of a different situation, given that their coach is leaving, but I’m specifically talking about the portal movement here.

This would meet the standard, in my opinion.  More than 25 players, including most of their top talents and contributors.

So does what’s happening with A&M meet that standard?  Is there a mass exodus?  Let’s examine that.

Has there been a mass exodus from the Texas A&M football program?

I’ll say this at the outset, here, and it might give away a bit of my conclusion.  If it were true that the Texas A&M football program’s main selling point to top recruits last year was an unparalleled commitment to NIL, then I think there would be a mass exodus.  If A, then B.  I think the latter would be evidence of the former. It makes sense why people would be predicting this, given their opinions of what went on in the 2022 recruiting cycle.  The question is whether that assumption is valid.

If it were true that the Texas A&M football program’s main selling point to top recruits last year was an unparalleled commitment to NIL, then I think there would be a mass exodus.  If A, then B.  I think the latter would be evidence of the former.

Think about this: of the 28 players to record a statistic in Texas A&M’s final game of the 2022 season, the LSU matchup, the Aggies have lost exactly one player to transfer.

Let me say that again: out of the 28 players who recorded a statistic of any kind against the Tigers, only one is transferring.  And he’s a senior LB who had been moved to a backup role after missing the first half of the season with injury.

The Aggies confronted many unprecedented situations upon signing that 2022 class.  It was a class so much more talented overall than what they had on campus, that they couldn’t be kept off the field.  And after the similarly unprecedented amount of injury, the talented freshmen began to be a bit overexposed— I particularly think now of things like run fits on the defensive line, which usually take a while to learn properly.  This, unsurprisingly, was an area of concern for the Aggies this past fall.

You can go position by position and player by player and see the effect this talent had on the roster.  QB Haynes King was replaced by Conner Weigman in the second half of the season.  QB Eli Stowers, after dealing with a shoulder issue and position flip-flop, similarly saw Weigman’s vicegrip on the signal-caller position and decided to take his talents elsewhere.  It began to be clear to players like Devin Price that, with the emergence of Moose Muhammad and Evan Stewart, they wouldn’t get a shot in College Station.  Marcus Burris and Dallas Walker had fallen to the back of the insane talent and depth the Aggies have built up on the defensive line.  Tunmise Adeleye, after missing so much of the season with injury, sensed he had lost his spot to Shemar Stewart.

I could go on, but you get the point.  Most of the departures were older players who are looking for more playing time.  So what about those freshmen that are departing?  What about Smoke Bouie, Denver Harris, Chris Marshall, Ish Harris, Marquis Groves-Killebrew, and PJ Williams?

Well, half of those guys were suspended for the whole latter half of the season.  Had Denver, Chris, and PJ stayed out of trouble, they would have no doubt figured into the future of the program— Denver and Chris had even already seen the field some.  But to call them contributors is misguided given the fact that the Aggies operated without them for the majority of the year and knew, given the circumstances, that they would be departing.  They didn’t leave because of the record.  It was the off-field issues that precipitated their exit.

Ish Harris didn’t see the field in 2022, and was one of the lower-rated guys in the class overall.  Bouie and Groves-Killebrew came to A&M mostly because of Nick Williams’s presence, and, upon him leaving for Colorado, they both decided to depart as well.  The 5-7 record was not the main factor in these decisions either, nor were promised NIL deals being reneged upon, or any other silly, conspiratorial musings from the twitterati.

That’s it.  Those are all the freshmen that have entered the portal.  If you take those six departing freshmen out, you still have the #1 class in 2022 per the 247Sports Composite.  It’s no longer the top class of all time, in that instance, but every class loses guys.  The second-place class in the all-time rankings doubtless lost guys to transfer as well.

Texas A&M Football has not lost that much production

Here’s the upshot of all of this: the numbers and the depth lost loom large.  But the actual production lost going forward is close to nonexistent.

Here’s the upshot of all of this: the numbers and the depth lost loom large.  But the actual production lost going forward is close to nonexistent.  Depth can be rebuilt through the portal very easily (though that’s more likely to happen in the later transfer cycle— guys in the portal now are looking for starting opportunities).

My other main point is that if the hypothesis were true that an unparalleled commitment to NIL was the distinct recruiting advantage that the Texas A&M football program had over every other team in the country in the 2022 cycle to the point where it was the deciding factor in many of these top recruitments, then we would have seen many more top contributors from the class bail at the first sign of trouble.  We would’ve seen opt-outs, lack of effort, and sideline blowups.

In actual fact, we saw none of those things.  We saw a team that banded together throughout the ups and the downs of the roller coaster season (three specific players aside).  We saw leaders emerge from the ranks of the young players.  We saw a team that believed in their coach and finished the year by knocking off a top-5 LSU team with designs on sneaking into the College Football Playoff.

The 2022 Aggies faced unprecedented circumstances.  Unsurprisingly, unprecedented events resulted, such as many upperclassmen losing their spots to underclassmen, leading to those upperclassmen deciding to transfer.  There, indeed, was unprecedented inconsistency from the unprecedented amount of youth on the field.

Hindsight is 20/20.  I’m not writing this to say that we should’ve all seen this coming: the extremely high number of injuries was another huge contributing factor in what we ended up seeing record-wise.  But looking back, in order to properly diagnose what is going on with the program, we have to be honest about the reasons that played into the result.  That means stripping away the narrative, the story that’s more fun to tell, and take a look at the facts of the individual cases.

Is such a process going to result in flash and eye-catching headlines?  More often than not, the answer is “no.”  Nuance doesn’t get a lot of clicks.  It’s easier to be black-and-white and make sweeping declarative statements.  But to stop people from making said sweeping declarative statements, the Aggies will have to prove it on the field.  They took the first step towards doing so with that win over LSU. Next comes Early Signing Day, then the OC hire, then the spring and the portal cycles.  It’ll be a while before we see the Maroon and White take the field again.  But when they do, they’ll have a mission.  They’ll have something to prove.  And I can’t wait to see it.