How many top QB recruits transfer? The staggering attrition of CFB’s most coveted players

For college quarterbacks, transferring is now standard operating procedure.

If you’re not playing, you’re leaving. If you are playing and one thing goes wrong, like a season-ending injury or a coaching change, you’re probably leaving.

The Athletic studied the careers of the top 50 high school quarterbacks who signed with FBS programs in the recruiting classes of 2017 through 2020. More than 70 percent have transferred during their time in college.

We did this same study at the end of 2019 for the top 50 QB recruits of the 2014-2017 classes and found that 57 percent had transferred from the school they initially signed with out of high school. At the time, that seemed like a high percentage. Not anymore.

Based on these recent classes, if a top-50 QB signee doesn’t start one game in his first two years on campus, there’s an 87 percent chance he’ll end up leaving the program. But among the quarterbacks who did earn a start in their first two years, more than 60 percent still ended up transferring during their careers.

It’s not that these players are all bad at picking schools. This is just the state of quarterback development at the college level. They enroll, learn the offense and compete for the starting job. If they’re not the guy, the typical next step is entering the portal and trying again somewhere else.

Three key changes occurred over the past three years to accelerate the trend. The extra year of eligibility every player was given for 2020 has extended the college careers of these quarterbacks. The one-time transfer rule went into effect in 2021. And then came NIL. All of those factors help incentivize the decision to transfer.

Yet at the same time, we have collectives trying to turn top quarterback recruits into millionaires. The saga of new Arizona State commit Jaden Rashada and his $13 million deal with Florida that fell through is certainly a more extreme sign of the times, but it does raise a valuable question: Is offering six- or seven-figure deals to high school quarterbacks actually a good investment?

To better understand the ROI of quarterback recruiting these days, let’s take a closer look at four recruiting classes and see how many QBs actually succeeded where they signed.

If you dig into the careers of top quarterback recruits from 2017 to 2020, you’ll find a wide spectrum of outcomes. There are NFL Draft picks, Heisman Trophy contenders, multi-year starters and transfer success stories. And there are plenty of players whose college careers didn’t work out like they’d hoped.

We looked at the top 50 recruits in each class according to the 247Sports Composite rankings. From that group of 200 passers, let’s start by removing 22 players who moved to another position in college.

There are some talented players in that group — running backs Roschon Johnson (Texas) and Ja’Quinden Jackson (Texas/Utah), wide receivers Keytaon Thompson (Mississippi State/Virginia) and Isaiah Williams (Illinois) and tight end Jelani Woods (Oklahoma State/Virginia) — who thrived by making a change. Arkansas’ Connor Noland focused on baseball, developed into an ace pitcher and got drafted by the Chicago Cubs.

Let’s also take out 10 players who retired for medical reasons or quit football with eligibility remaining. That leaves us with 168 college quarterbacks who were top-50 recruits.

So far, 126 of the 168 quarterbacks have transferred. That’s 75 percent.

That’s right: Only 42 of these quarterbacks stayed at one school during their career. As you’d expect, there are a bunch of big names in that pool of players. There’s the Alabama trio of Bryce Young, Mac Jones and Tua Tagovailoa. There’s Clemson’s Trevor Lawrence, Pitt’s Kenny Pickett and six more NFL Draft picks. Ohio State’s C.J. Stroud, TCU’s Max Duggan, UCLA’s Dorian Thompson-Robinson and several more are hoping to get drafted in April.

They played early in their careers, proved themselves and found success. There are a few examples like Jones or Stanford’s Davis Mills who waited until they were third-year players to get their shot, but most (30 of 42) earned starts in their first two years on campus.

The increasingly common occurrence now is quarterbacks earning starting jobs early on and still choosing to transfer during their career. Bo Nix, Jayden Daniels and Dillon Gabriel were all true freshman starters. Spencer Rattler, Devin Leary and Graham Mertz won starting jobs as redshirt freshmen. Among these 168 quarterback recruits, 78 were able to start games in their first two years. It’s an important achievement, but it doesn’t guarantee their college years will live up to their expectations.

When did they make their first start?

Top 50 QB signees, 2017-2020

If you’re a top-50 QB recruit who’s not getting on the field in your first two years, you’re probably ready to enter the portal and restart your career elsewhere. But among these 2017-2020 recruits, we’ve actually seen more QBs — 47 of them — exit at the end of Year 3. More than one-third already had their degree and left as grad transfers. These days, you’re rarely ever going to see a top-50 recruit stick around and settle for the role of career backup. Of the 70 QBs who didn’t start a game in their first three years, 97 percent transferred.

In fact, Georgia’s Carson Beck is the only quarterback on this list of 168 who did not start a game in his first three years and has not transferred. He’s hoping to succeed Stetson Bennett, win the job and lead the defending national champs as a redshirt junior in 2023. And if that doesn’t work out? There are plenty of other schools where he can play.

For these quarterbacks, maximizing your potential may mean overcoming an awful lot of challenges. There’s no better example than Duggan and his TCU career.

He endured injuries and losing seasons and coaching changes, lost his starting job, got it back and pulled off an epic senior season. Guys like him who stay put and persevere through it all are feel-good stories, no doubt, but they’re the exception now.

And it’s easy to see why. For these top-50 QB recruits, finding the right fit might not seem exceedingly difficult during the initial recruiting process, but that idea of “fit” ends up being a moving target over the course of a four- to six-year period. They’re incredibly fortunate if they get to play the duration of their college career under the same head coach and the same offensive coordinator with whom they signed.

The challenge once they get to campus isn’t just earning trust and playing time. It’s the reality that coaches are constantly trying to find and sign better quarterbacks. But now it’s not just situations like Cade Klubnik surpassing DJ Uiagalelei at Clemson or Rattler getting benched for Caleb Williams at Oklahoma. During the 2022-23 transfer cycle, 123 FBS scholarship quarterbacks have entered the portal, including 67 from Power 5 programs. The offseason transfer QB carousel becoming the norm inevitably results in even more attrition.

Washington State took transfer Cameron Ward knowing it would cost the Cougars starter Jayden de Laura, who went to Arizona. Notre Dame lost Drew Pyne to get Sam Hartman. Casey Thompson left Texas after the Longhorns landed Quinn Ewers and became the starter at Nebraska. Now he has to win the job all over again under a new staff that brought in Georgia Tech transfer Jeff Sims.

The popularity of the portal has at least opened up more opportunities for these QBs in need of a change. Among these 126 QBs who did transfer, almost 75 percent ended up at another FBS program, and 42 percent got to stay at the Power 5 level. Only nine of the 126 had to go to a junior college to continue their careers.

There are plenty of examples of players thriving after they transferred. Hendon Hooker, Malik Willis, Will Levis, Michael Penix Jr., Jake Haener and Cameron Rising were all recruits in this 2017-2020 period who turned around their careers by choosing the right school for their second act. At the start of the 2022 season, transfer QBs had won 61 of the 131 starting jobs at the FBS level.

But as JT Daniels and others have demonstrated, sometimes one transfer isn’t enough. Of these 126 top-50 QB recruits from 2017 to 2020 who ended up transferring, 39 have transferred multiple times during their career. We’ve already seen 16 of them make that move this offseason, including starters like Tanner Mordecai, Kedon Slovis, Phil Jurkovec, Jack Plummer and Emory Jones.

Daniels, a five-star in the 2018 class, has gone from USC to Georgia to West Virginia to finishing his career at Rice. But he’s not alone. Three more QBs from this list of 200 have done the same thing. Joey Gatewood, a top-50 recruit in that same class, went from Auburn to Kentucky to UCF. After moving to wide receiver for the Knights, he’s now back in the transfer portal.

The appeal of paying big money for top quarterback recruits is easy to understand. If you can land a player at that position who could potentially have a program-changing impact, it seems like a worthy investment.

So let’s come back to the original question: What is the likelihood of that investment paying off?

In the recruiting classes of 2017-2020, a total of 31 quarterbacks finished as top-100 recruits in the 247Sports Composite rankings. Eight of them ended up on the fast track to the NFL and played three college seasons before going pro: Tua Tagovailoa, Jake Fromm, Trevor Lawrence, Justin Fields, Sam Howell, Bryce Young, C.J. Stroud and Tanner McKee. Five of them became Heisman finalists. You can certainly make a case for those players being worth top dollar. But that’s eight out of 31. Only two others — Matt Corral and Dorian Thompson-Robinson — have developed into all-conference selections.

What we can learn from the recruiting classes of 2017-2020 so far is, if you’re investing in a top-100 quarterback recruit right now, you need to understand the probability that he’ll finish his career at your school is 35 percent. There’s a 61 percent chance he’ll become your starting QB for at least one full season, which is encouraging. But even if that comes true, there’s still a 47 percent chance he’ll end up in the portal during his career. And out of all 31 top-100 recruits, only 23 percent developed into all-conference players for their first school.

But here’s the problem with those percentages: They’re probably too high. There’s still plenty of time for these highly rated quarterbacks to transfer or transfer again. And if you look ahead to the class of 2021, the early results look ominous.

We left the 2021 recruits out of this study because it felt too early to judge them. They’ve only been in college for two years. But 27 of the top 50 have already transferred, including five of the top 10: Ewers, Williams, Sam Huard, Jake Garcia and Jaxson Dart. Many more could enter the portal in May if spring competitions don’t go their way.

That’s just how it goes now for young quarterbacks trying to make it in this era of college football: start or depart.

(Illustration: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic; Photos: James Gilbert, David K Purdy, Scott W. Grau / Getty Images)