In the Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) era of college sports, there has been an increased emphasis on recruitment through the transfer portal. In particular, the 2024 college football transfer portal cycle was the most active with a record-setting 4000 college football players entering the transfer portal. With college football being a billion-dollar industry, and with the new college football playoff format giving teams a renewed hope of championship aspirations, the importance of team construction is at an all-time high. Taking these factors into consideration, how do teams decide on what players to pursue in the transfer portal?

My idea is to develop a tool that makes suggestions on which players teams should pursue in the transfer portal. This would take in a variety of factors including aggregate transfer portal rankings, filtering by certain desired player statistics such as adjusted completion percentage and number of QB pressures, and NIL valuations. As part of the player suggestions, it could be nice to include a prediction on the probability of landing a desired player. The data would primarily come from recruiting and statistics databases such as 247Sports, ESPN, On3, and PFF College.

This is a tool that can be marketed to the recruitment teams at every school as well as to NIL collectives. This would be a cool project for anyone interested in exploring sports analytics!