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The transfer portal has changed how college football teams operate, and the impacts of the portal have become increasingly apparent in the NFL Draft. The way talent flows through college football now means the kind of player that makes their way into the NFL early in the draft tends to find its way to the big programs in college football first.
The 2025 NFL Draft has served as a shining example of how the power structure of college football is continuing to evolve, with the power programs and conferences separating themselves from the pack. The SEC and Big Ten accounted for 26 of the 32 first-round picks and 66 of the 102 picks in the first three rounds of this year’s draft, making up an historic rate of early round picks. In total, 90 of the first 102 picks finished their careers at power conference programs (an astounding 88.2 percent).
Here, we wanted to explore how those figures would differ for each conference and school if we looked at where each of those picks started their college careers rather than where they spent their final year in school to see how big an impact the transfer portal has had on the 2025 NFL Draft.
Over the course of the first three rounds, the SEC (31) and Big Ten (25) still lead the way by a big margin but do have 10 fewer combined picks that started out in those conferences. Five of those picks started at the FCS level before moving up, including the top two picks in the draft — although Travis Hunter is a unique figure in being a 5-star recruit that opted to go to Jackson State. As for FBS conferences, the three that saw the…
Source link : https://www.cbssports.com/college-football/news/transfer-portal-impact-on-2025-nfl-draft-power-shift-in-college-football-evident-through-first-three-rounds/
Author : Robby Kalland
Publish date : 2025-04-26 17:30:00
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