The Morning Stake | 2021.02.03

I’ve had a couple of thoughts rolling through my head, one of them was about football players entering the transfer portal and SI’s Ross Dellenger wrote about players who enter the transfer portal don’t always have a home, in part because programs are limited to bringing in 25 players per class. This makes a ton of sense and if you haven’t considered this, if a program signs a 20-man recruiting class, they have 5 spots available to recruit other players or maybe transfers. But then they have 10 players leave through the transfer portal. A program doesn’t get to replace the 10 that leave, they are limited to the 25 per class.

There’s also a collection of portal entrants, the number of which is unknown, who have had to swallow a very difficult medicine: They’ve become walk-ons. Some, like Netherly, may soon be out of football completely.

“Right now, there are a lot of kids in the portal that are not going to find scholarships,” Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby says. “There may be twice as many people in the portal as there are places to transfer. There will be some who won’t be able to go to college if they don’t get a scholarship.”

The recent portal influx can be traced to the impending one-time transfer exception. Expecting the transfer legislation to pass in January, leagues of players rushed into the transfer portal to get a head start on a market expected to boom in the spring and summer.

I know that we (me included) complained quite a bit about the small class for Texas Tech and Matt Wells, but programs have to be a bit nimble in that if they can go after transfers who can make an immediate impact and you need to replace a player that transfers, then that’s something you really need to do. I’d also add that this is why Texas A&M transfer Tyree Wilson was a walk-on last year, with the promise of a scholarship moving forward. Texas Tech had already handed out all of their 25 available scholarships, so that’s all they had to offer. It is definitely an interesting situation.

And although today is probably a bit anti-climatic, today is National Signing Day (I think) there will be some preferred walk-on’s who will have their day in the sunshine, these are big moments for those players.

Speaking of walk-ons, Texas Tech football will have another McPhearson as Zech has graduated with his brother Ezekiel McPhearson to walk-on at Texas Tech. I think that this is the same guy, Matthew E. McPhearson was drafted by the Arizona Diamondbacks in the 4th round of the 2013 MLB draft. And DeAnza College, the author of the tweet, is a junior college in California (I think).

The Lady Raiders are set to host Kansas State tonight at 6:00 p.m. with the game on ESPN+.

Texas Tech baseball checks in at No. 4 in the National Collegiate Baseball Writers Association initial preseason poll, which is a lot of top 5 preseason picks for Texas Tech baseball. In addition to this release, the press conference with head coach Tim Tadlock was entertaining largely because of his exchange with reporter Ronald Clark, who was wearing an Oregon sweatshirt (not sure where Clark works, but he graduated from Oregon) and Tadlock talked about how he had some guys who used to talk about Oregon vs. Oregon State all of the time. Regardless, I think Tadlock liked talking to Ronald and Tadlock is ready to play baseball.

This is a good video.

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