INDIANAPOLIS — Grey Zabel hesitated. The North Dakota State tackle didn’t know if he should answer the question posed by a reporter. The two-time FCS national champion played five seasons for the Bison, and was one of seven FCS players invited to the NFL combine this year, the smallest number of small school prospects, defined as players who most recently played below the Division I FBS level, in a decade. Zabel said he had a few offers from bigger programs to enter the transfer portal.
How much money did you leave on the table by not entering the transfer portal for a Power 4 FBS program last year?
“That’s a tough answer,” Zabel said, and paused to think about his words. “Six figures.”
“It’s not just me. There’s other very talented players that are getting tampered with every single year, that our guys are being [enticed] to transfer elsewhere. … It’s tough for a lot of these guys to turn down that type of money. But in the long run, you just got to fall back to what you believe in.”
Zabel said he believed in Bison football, which he describes as a player-driven and process-driven program. He played for the same offensive line coach, Dan Larson, for the past four years, a coach who has a record of developing players for the NFL. The Zabels have a family farm in South Dakota, and Grey didn’t have much NIL money from NDSU, but he used what he had to lease 245 acres of farmland in South Dakota. The Bison lost in the semifinals of the 2023 postseason, and he didn’t want to end his time in Fargo, North Dakota, that way.
“It’s an emptiness that you want to fill immediately,” Zabel said. He wanted to be a national champion again, and he did that. Since then, he has been climbing draft boards because of a strong Senior Bowl week and versatility to play guard and center. He could be a first-round pick, and many teams are asking him questions about why he didn’t move up.
“The dollar range was in a place where you had to consider it, and you had to truly think about it,” he said. “It was a hard decision, but at the end of the day, it was a super easy decision to decide to stay at North Dakota State and play my final year there because of the culture, the relationships you make, the locker room that you established and played with the past four years. You don’t want to leave those guys or leave that program, you want to stick where you started, stay home, and in the end, win the last game of the season.”
Zabel is a rarity in college now. NIL money and the one-time transfer rule, which went into effect for the 2021 college football season, allowed college athletes to transfer once and not sit out the season (the rule expanded in 2024 to allow unlimited transfers with no penalties as long as players met academic requirements). That led to a steady decline in small school players making the combine. They’re all moving up before they go pro.
“The Khalil Macks of the world [played four years at Buffalo of the MAC before going No. 5 in the 2014 draft] will be relics of the NFL drafts past,” an analytics staffer for an NFL team said. “With the money you get in the portal now — not sure we’ll ever see another top 10 pick out of an FCS or lower program again.”
From 2016 to 2021, before the transfer rule, an average of 20.5 small schoolers were invited to the combine. Since 2022, that average has dropped to 14.5, the lowest it has been in the past 10 years.
Zero D-II or D-III prospects have been invited to the past two combines. From 2015 to 2021, an average of 3.5 sub-FCS players were invited, with a high of seven D-II and D-III players invited in 2017.
If the small school prospect is on the verge of extinction, what does it mean for NFL teams?
ACCORDING TO AN NFL club that shared its data with ESPN, two of 336 players (0.6%) in the 2018 scouting combine transferred to a higher level of college football (NAIA to D-II, FCS to FBS, for example) from a non-FBS program. This year, 28 of the 330 players (8.5%) invited to the scouting combine have transferred up at least once from a non-FBS program — 14 times the number of players who transferred up seven years ago. A total of 126 of this year’s 330 (38.2%) transferred from any level of college football at least once, with the majority of those players moving to a school at the same level. Only 18 of 336 (5.4%) at the 2018 combine transferred at any point from any level.
Two of the biggest names in this draft class — Miami quarterback Cam Ward and Colorado quarterback Shedeur Sanders — are part of the 2025 transfer group. Ward went from FCS program Incarnate Word to FBS program Washington State, which was then a Power 5 school, and then last year, as the Pac-12 crumbled and the Power 5 became the Power 4, he transferred to the ACC’s Hurricanes to remain at the the top level of college football competition. Sanders went from FCS program Jackson State to FBS P4 Colorado.
A director of player personnel for a Group of 5 college football team laughed when told the number of total transfers for 2018 — 18?! Seven players from his program transferred up this offseason and four transferred in from lower levels of college football. He spoke to ESPN anonymously because he was not authorized to speak on the record.
One of the seven transfers he lost was an offensive lineman who had scarcely played — just 15 snaps all season. He left for a “blue-chip” Power 4 program that offered him because of his size, a pure projection move.
The director of player personnel says his program will lose this battle every time to a Power 4 program because it doesn’t have the NIL money to compete. He estimated the range for a player moving up to a Power 4 program for a starting role to be in the mid-six figures.
An FCS offensive coordinator — also not authorized by his team to speak — said he had an “average, at best” tackle transfer out of his program in December for a deal at an FBS school worth $1.7 million.
“It’s much harder to retain players, especially at the lower levels,” the G5 player personnel director said.
One scouting director for an NFL club said he has been having conversations with his staff members about how they might need to change their process and spend less time going to smaller programs. “Go where the players are,” he said.
The G5 director of player personnel said the director-level scouts haven’t been coming to scout his program the past couple of years because his seniors have transferred up. Area scouts are still coming through — for now. One area scout said he’s still going to all of his “free agent schools” outside of the power conferences, but he has noticed that many of his peers are not.
“There’s just less talent available at those levels,” the scout said. “And sometimes, it’s frustrating because they’ll leave, let’s say, San Jose State or Louisiana Tech or something, and they end up being a backup at a Big 12 school, or a Big Ten school, and you think, ‘Wow, they got paid,’ and they’re not even on the field.”
The increase in transfers can make a scout’s job harder in some ways because it requires more work to collect information on the player’s personality and internal makeup across multiple schools, but it has also made their job easier because they can get a more accurate idea of how the prospect will perform at the NFL level.
“The hardest thing to do in scouting, in my opinion, is normalizing competition,” one NFL analytics staffer said. “It’s why it makes SEC players often easier to project — you know they’re also going against elite players.”
“Seeing them at a big program against real NFL talent is very helpful,” one veteran NFL area scout said. “I’ve thought a few times this year, ‘I bet this dude would’ve tricked someone into drafting him if he would’ve stayed where he was.'”
A transfer on a player’s résumé used to be such an outlier that it would prompt questions. Players had to explain and defend themselves for transferring. Now that the college football landscape has changed so much, a transfer isn’t an automatic red flag. One area scout said it’s only a deterrent if the player has transferred three to four times at the Power 4 level, but also said scouts find it refreshing when a player has never transferred.
Raiders general manager John Spytek worked as Tampa Bay’s assistant general manager before accepting the Raiders job in January. The Buccaneers have had success drafting small school players such as former guard Ali Marpet out of D-II Hobart College and guard Alex Cappa out of D-II Humboldt State.
“Maybe those guys transfer up now,” Spytek said. “Maybe they don’t. I give a lot of respect to the guys that stick it out with the school they’re at and take a smaller NIL deal than they could have gotten if they would have transferred to the big one. There’s a loyalty and a quality to that human that really stands out. And there’s a couple guys in this draft this year that had the same opportunity.”
At the same time, transferring up has become so expected and normal in this era of college football that it’s almost a red flag when an elite player at a lower level doesn’t take a chance to face better competition. Another NFL scout said when his team discussed William & Mary tackle Charles Grant, one of the seven FCS players at the combine, it questioned why he didn’t transfer up when he had opportunities. Why didn’t he want to test himself?
DELAWARE RUNNING BACK Marcus Yarns — one of the seven FCS combine invites — could have moved up to a bigger program for his last season, but he heard bigger programs were interested in him as part of a one-two punch at running back, meaning his snap count would decrease. So he remained a Blue Hen before he knew what the money would look like, in part because he knew he’d be the featured back but also because Delaware had been loyal to him during the high school recruiting process. Yarns said he fractured his knee at the start of his senior season of high school and lost all of his Power 5 offers.
“Playing against better competition was always a good thing, and I felt as though I could,” Yarns said. “But it [was] never a possibility that I couldn’t get to the NFL. I always thought I had the talent to make it to where I’m at now, so I just stayed down.”
He finished the season with five 100-yard rushing games, 1,141 total yards, 126.8 yards per game and 11 total touchdowns. The experience of losing all his Power 5 offers during his senior high school season and “seeing how the business operated in that fashion” made him wary of trusting any offers to transfer up.
“[Delaware] really believes in me, and they have trust in me, so it’s only right for me to stay there and remain loyal.”
A former NFL front office staffer who works in the college football industry said there is a lack of comprehensive data on transfer portal strategy and success.
“What percentage of players are playing more versus less, or producing more versus less, as they’re moving up in a level,” he said. “I haven’t seen any real research done on any of these transfer-type analytics. It would add a lot of value if you knew about certain positions that translate better from level to level, or certain leading indicators that you could use that would give you more confidence in portal success.”
Last offseason, 26 Sun Belt Conference players transferred up to the P4. According to Arkansas radio reporter Kara Richey, who tracked the moves, two of the 26 had their snap count increase in 2024. Four players saw their snap counts decrease by 10% or less and the remaining 20 had snap counts decrease by more than 10%.
“You never know what’s going to happen when you switch schemes, play against different competition, and then have different coaches who are asking you to do different things,” the Group of 5 personnel director said. “So, you’re rolling the dice. … If you had stayed at the G5 program you were excelling in, you play 500 snaps, or catch 100 balls. [The scouts are] at least going to know about you. They are going to do a lot more work on you than they’re going to do on the Power 4 backup.”
“You get better when you play,” one area scout said. “So often, guys make that biggest jump during their final year and the light just starts to come on. To waste it now … you’re at Texas A&M, and you’re playing on the second string on the special teams.”
ZABEL TOOK A seat on a couch in the Excel Sports suite at the prospects’ hotel in Indianapolis, and joined his fellow Excel Sports-represented offensive linemen to watch the linebackers run the 40. He had just finished a long day of interviews with NFL teams, and could finally decompress with his team. Excel Sports training mate and Washington linebacker Carson Bruener was on deck to run, and all the agency employees and players in the suite went silent as he knelt at the starting line.
“Here we go!” Zabel yelled. “Here we go! 4.58, 4.58!
“He’s scooting!”
When Bruener crossed the finish line in exactly 4.58 seconds, everyone in the room erupted. Zabel whooped and clapped for his pal. It was this same energy that got him voted captain in his final season at North Dakota State.
“It’s something I hold really close to my heart, being a captain my senior year, because it’s one of the biggest honors you can get in the program,” Zabel said. “It’s one of those deals where you just don’t come in and be a captain right away your first or second year, you got to put in the sweat equity and continue to prove you’re a leader in how hard you worked on the field, off the field.”
A captaincy would have been out of reach if he had transferred. And that intangible piece of a football team — the player-created culture — is what Zabel sees dying out as teammates transferred up and the small school prospect became a rarity.
“When you lose guys like that, it feels like you lose key parts of your team, key parts of your programs. … But at the same time, you’ll never be able to blame somebody for bettering themselves. So that’s just the reality of college football nowadays.”
