NCAA Transfer Portal weakens athletics at the Virginia Military Institute
Student-athletes are using it as an escape hatch, exacerbating the Division I military school’s struggles with recruitment.
By Christian Basnight, Emma Mansfield, Ryan Raicht and Carly Snyder
Evan Eller started his senior year of high school with 23 offers to play Division I football.
Nearly all of the schools lost interest when he tore his ACL. Coaches at the Virginia Military Institute never gave up and kept calling. Eller knew little about VMI, other than it was in Lexington, not far from his home in Roanoke. As an 18-year-old, he thought he could handle the strict discipline and bare lifestyle of a military school. He soon grew tired of the regimentation of nearly every hour of his day, and getting to the dining hall after long practices to find there was little if any food left. He entered the NCAA’s transfer portal in 2022.
Soccer player Michael Ogenyi didn’t know much about VMI’s famous Rat Line, the arduous initiation of at least six months that all first-year students must complete, when he arrived on campus in 2019. Ogenyi says an administrator ordered him to remove a Black Lives Matter flag that he and other Black cadets had displayed in the barracks after George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis in May 2020. Ogenyi entered the transfer portal and by fall 2021 was playing soccer for Hampden-Sydney College less than 90 miles away.
This year, the starting five players on VMI’s basketball team parlayed their year of experience to enter the portal and transfer to more successful programs at schools such as Indiana State University, North Dakota State University and the University of Northern Colorado.
The NCAA established the transfer portal in 2018 to streamline the process for student-athletes who want to transfer between schools. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the NCAA allowed athletes whose seasons were cut short to gain an extra year of eligibility. In 2021, the NCAA adopted a new rule that allowed athletes to begin to play immediately after transferring to avoid sitting out for a year.
This timeline highlights some of the most important rule changes implemented by the NCAA in recent years that have altered the landscape of college athletics today. Sources: NCAA reports from 2018, 2020, 2021 and 2024
Since then, athletes have used the portal as an escape hatch to move from team to team, like professional players with free agency, trying to capitalize and profit on their skills and talent while they still can.
Graphic showing the approximate number of VMI football transfers. Source: On3, a sports news and analysis website
For VMI, it’s worse. Between 30 and 60 VMI student-athletes have entered the transfer portal this year, said Greg Horne, VMI’s Transfer Portal contact. The widespread use of the portal has exacerbated the small military school’s long-standing struggles to recruit student-athletes. Recruiting has never been easy for VMI because of the college’s military structure, its history of racism and sexism, and a lack of funding that has left its athletics programs in the red.
VMI’s basketball program has been hit the hardest by the NCAA transfer portal compared to the school’s other teams. Sources: On3, a sports news and analysis website, and a former VMI player
“I’m a firm believer that water settles at some point,” said Steve Corder, NCAA D-I legislative committee member. “So one, we got to get through this next year, last year of COVID, and then see if you don’t have that fifth year, that grad year, how many people are going to continue to transfer?”
Since student-athletes gained an extra year of eligibility from COVID-19, the number of men’s basketball players entering the transfer portal has spiked across D-I, according to data obtained from the NCAA. Source: Transfer Portal Data: Division I Student-Athlete Transfer Trends, 2024
In October 2020, then-Gov. Ralph Northam, a 1981 VMI graduate, asked Barnes & Thornburg, a Richmond law firm, to investigate the college. The following June, the firm issued a 152-page report that found that institutional racism and sexism had gone unaddressed at the college.
The investigation found that “VMI’s delay in addressing its Confederate symbolism and past, its delay in undertaking DEI initiatives, and the continued, loud resistance to reform efforts among many in the VMI community are a sign to African Americans that they are not valued or wanted at VMI.” The report also described a “culture of not taking women seriously; double-standards for women on matters of dress, social behavior, and sexual behavior; and disturbing sexist and misogynistic comments on social media apps.”
Over the years, VMI has been sued over allegations of sexual assault and hazing. For example, in January 2020, a former first-year student filed a federal lawsuit in Roanoke, alleging that five upper-class cadets had engaged in “waterboarding and other acts of hazing, included but not limited to, sexual assault and/or sexual harassment.”