01.16.26
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Best available QB is a cautionary portal tale

College football players still in the portal piss me off.

Yesterday (Jan. 15, 2025), a date that will live in infamy, was the last day that players could both 1) enter their name in the portal and 2) declare a new school.

Peter Clarke is the first guy from London since Ben Franklin to realize he’s better off in Philadelphia.

There is, Thank Freaking God, no spring transfer portal window anymore.

It is now a minute past the deadline and one of the best quarterbacks remaining in the portal, Incarnate Word’s E.J. Colson, is still there.

He might find a new school. He might not but his chances of not finding a landing spot skyrocketed several minutes ago.

There are a couple of reasons for that.

One, pretty much all 134 FBS schools have now allocated their available scholarships for quarterbacks.

One of those schools is Temple.

The Owls chose not to wait on Colson–hell, we will now never know that they even tried to get him–and “settled” on both Penn State backup Jaxon Smolik and Washington State backup Ajani Sheppard.

Looks like Longstreet signed with LSU yesterday.

We say settled because neither did squat in the few opportunities they had on the field at the schools they played at (Sheppard was also a backup at Rutgers).

Colson, on the other hand, did plenty in his most recent opportunities.

The guy started a couple of games at UCF (when UCF was good), transferred to Purdue, had a moment of clarity when he saw he couldn’t get on the field there and transferred to an FCS school (Incarnate Word) that had a track record for producing quarterbacks like Cam Ward.

He finished the 2025 season there with 2,134 yards, 16 touchdown passes and only four interceptions and declared himself the “best available” quarterback in the portal.

That must have been some agent whispering in his ear because, while he thought his landing spot might have been a place like USC or LSU, he’s still up there and nobody knows if his parachute has a backup.

His landing spot could be a splat.

It wouldn’t be the first time this happened.

In 2022, Liberty had a 1,000-yard back in the portal who we urged Temple to get on this site.

Temple didn’t get him nor did any other school.

As a result, he lost both his scholarship to Liberty and a chance to prove to the NFL that he had the talent to play there. As far as we know, he is completely out of football.

Fortunately for Temple, not all feel that way.

Peter Clarke was told this week that if he declared for the NFL draft, he would be one of the top five tight ends chosen.

Clarke looked at this thing realistically and figured that another year at Temple might push him from No. 5 to No. 1.

Jaxon Smolik, who transferred from Penn State to Temple. looked at the Clarke film with Temple OC Tyler Walker and figured that was his ticket to the NFL, too, and committed here.

Maybe both will sign with the Eagles someday.

Their chances are much better than Colson’s and that is one of the thousands of reasons why the transfer portal taketh more than it giveth and agents should put more care into finding their clients a spot where they can play vs. a spot that might never happen.

Monday: The Good News for Temple

7 thoughts on “Best available QB is a cautionary portal tale”

  1. Landen Clark to LSU raises another eyebrow. Lane Kiffin took another QB from Temple. And, Clark will sit behind both Leavitt and Longstreet.

    P4 schools pay third string QBs more than Temple can pay a projected starter? The compensation for QBs will only increase in the coming years. Chambliss went to Ole Miss as a backup last year. Clark goes to LSU this year as a third stringer.

    In the future, Temple must source the most important position in football from the recruiting trail.

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    • Crazy. If you are a good agent who knows football more than money, you want to find your client a place where he’s going to be the starter. If I’m an agent for a guy like Colson, I steer him to Temple where he only has to compete against 3d stringers from WSU and PSU. What do we have instead? A guy (T.J. Finley) who steered Texas State to an 8-5 record First Responders Bowl win over Rice (and E.J. Warner) two years ago, signing at Freaking Incarnate Word and the freaking Incarnate Word QB (who threw for over 2,000 yards, 16 TDs, 4 INTs) having no place to play with the portal being over. Somebody (agents, specifically) is not doing their jobs. Meanwhile, Temple goes from a guy who threw for over 300 yards in a Big 10 game (Evan Simon) and a Jerry Rice winner (best FCS player in the country) as a backup (Gevani McCoy) to guys who haven’t done squat. No way you can tell me now that Temple hasn’t downgraded at the QB position in 2026 from 2025. Just keeping it real here like I always do. Not a cheerleader but someone who wants to have a reason to cheerlead.

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    • To your last sentence, they invested $300,000 in a QB offer last year. No way you can convince me they are paying either of these two scrubs $100,000K, let alone $300K (sorry, Jaxon and Ajani).

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  2. Yeah, I know it’s 9:51 p.m. in Hawaii and 3:51 a.m. in Philly but I can’t sleep. Ugh.

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  3. Here’s some change that might be happening in so far as eligibility rulings. Perhaps reason soon spills over to transfers.

    (From Thin Red Line by Eric Evans)

    It’s no secret that I have pilloried Judge Claudia Wilken for a decade. She was plainly engaging in social engineering from the bench, monkeying with structures well beyond her grasp and allowed (indeed steered) O’Bannon into a stalking horse to enable pay-for-play. Her disastrous mismanagement from the bench included presiding over the equally-fatuous House, has twisted antitrust law into an unrecognizable thing, and blown open the door to abuse federal law like a pool boy at a Diddy Party.

    There are several bad faith actors that have made a killing dipping their hands into this noxious cookie jar (Tom Mars, Darren Heitner among others), as well as given trial courts a free hand to destroy the NCAA, one injunction at a time.

    But now it looks like one of the worst offenders, U.S. District Judge William L. Campbell has grown tired of rubberstamping one terrible precedent after another to benefit the Vols and Commodores, and is now trying to unwind the clock:

    A federal judge denied a request Thursday for a preliminary injunction by five college football players seeking to play a fifth season this fall.

    U.S. District Judge William L. Campbell wrote that the players did not make the case that they likely would succeed on their claim that the NCAA violates U.S. antitrust laws with its redshirt rule that restricts athletes to four seasons over five years.

    ***

    All five have competed four seasons in four years without taking a redshirt year. They are linebacker Langston Patterson of Vanderbilt; kicker Nathanial Vakos, tight end Lance Mason and long snapper Nick Levy, all of Wisconsin; and long snapper Kevin Gallic of Nebraska.

    Attorney Ryan Downton said in a statement his clients are disappointed that they are unlikely to play next season.

    “We understand why the Court did not want to require such a major rule change on a limited judicial record,” Downton said. “We remain confident the NCAA has no legitimate reason to make athletes sit out most [or all] of one of their five seasons of eligibility.”

    This was the right call. Five years seems more than adequate, with four full-time eligible playing years, as it has always been. These players were seeking a flat-five injunction, to change the NCAA rules from a courthouse. Many pundits predicted that the NCAA would eventually capitulate and make that its new standard. But, they pre-empted the plaintiffs here by okaying a modified Redshirt rule that allows players to appear in 75% of the contests in their non-qualifying season. That seems to have been enough baby-splitting for Judge Campbell.

    Big, big win for the norm here, as this is the most plaintiff-friendly court in the CFB antitrust landscape. But even in Campbell’s star chamber, they couldn’t carry their burden here.

    It’s important in another respect too: absent an injunction, where the evidence is scant and there’s not a complete trial record to be had, these plaintiff attorneys looking for quick kills are now SOL. Why? Because such injunctions are not amenable to appeal.

    That means the ghouls are going to have to litigate the entire matter at trial, and show their hands. I’m very doubtful that they do so. No, we’re far more likely to see this pop up in other jurisdictions, where Campbell’s ruling is not binding on them. But, if you’re the NCAA, you have a major win under your belt to hold up when the five-year cases pop up again. And they will. Whac-a-mole? Sure. But it’s a mighty big mole that just got bopped.

    Perhaps, just perhaps, we’re starting to cram the genie back into its lamp. Federal judges got us into this mess. They are going to have to get us out of it.

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  4. Tyler Douglas exited the portal and came back to Temple. If I’m him, I would have done the same thing. “Look at this QB room. None of these guys with CFB experience have done more than me.”

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  5. Why can’t Colson come here as a walk-on, (or a linebacker, WR, etc.) and move him to QB if he earns it?

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