With the transfer portal’s December window open for business until Dec. 28, head coaches across the country are tasked with restructuring their roster to meet the 105-man limit for the 2025 season.
For Nebraska’s Matt Rhule and Boston College’s Bill O’Brien, they’re required to do that on top of running postseason practices and creating a game plan to win the Bad Boy Mowers Pinstripe Bowl at Yankee Stadium in New York City on Dec. 28.
The two coaches were part of a press conference via zoom that was also streamed on the YES Network. When asked about the transfer portal and how it impacts programs playing in bowl games, O’Brien had a few things on his mind.
“Who makes these rules? Who opens the portal during the bowl season? I don’t understand that,” O’Brien said. “The portal should be open after the bowl season, but that’s just one man’s opinion.”
O’Brien, who was hired in February and hasn’t even had a full year of being Boston College’s head coach, says it’s been difficult trying to keep his team together for the bowl game. Rhule would agree.
“The whole portal and things like that, I could sit here for hours (and talk about it),” O’Brien said. “I don’t want to speak for coach Rhule at all, but I don’t know. You try to keep your team together, get them ready to play a game, but now the portal pops open. But it’s part of the deal. It’s the system that we live in and we deal with it every day and we do the best we can.”
As he’s done several times before, Rhule mentioned the walk-on players he has so much respect for. Most all of them will need to move on from the program. It’s those hard discussions with players Rhule dislikes the most.
“I think, as we all know, when something’s meant to benefit some, it usually benefits the upper 10 percent and there’s a lot of collateral damage,” Rhule said of the new 105-man roster rule. “So we have a bunch of kids that don’t know where they’re going to be in the future. They don’t have a place to go, and yet they still want to go be a part of this bowl, because they love their team. They love Nebraska.”
Rhule went on to say this season is probably the most grateful he’s ever been for a bowl trip, and it’s because of the guys sticking around and wanting to be part of a team that could have been the spark to turning the football program around, in a more successful direction.
But while he’s working to prepare his team to win a football game, Rhule is also juggling conversations with players and their agents dealing with the transfer portal, NIL and potential opt-outs.
“Each kid will be a little bit different, and I think everything’s fluid, right?” Rhule said of potential opt-outs. “We have agents now. There was never an agent in college football legally. Now, everyone has agents and things like that. So we’ll deal with each kid as they come. But I think coach O’Brien said it best for us — this is a celebration from last year, but it’s also a great start to next year. So, looking forward to seeing the opportunity a lot of guys get.”
O’Brien said he educated his current team on the Nebraska football program, its Blackshirt tradition and the long and proud history of walk-ons. Boston College has about 120 players on its roster, so O’Brien will be going through roster trimming as well.
“The 105 rule might be the most ridiculous rule, in my opinion,” O’Brien said. “When I went to Penn State, the way that we kept the team together was with walk-ons. We have a couple walk-ons from Penn State that were with me there, they’re coming to visit us this weekend to watch us practice. The walk-ons are the heart and soul of college football.
“…We don’t have 150 (players) like Matt does, but we have 120 or so who, at some point in time, we’ve got to cut down,” O’Brien continued. “We have to cut 15 kids to get the 105, that makes no sense to me. I don’t know who makes those rules, but I would certainly love to sit down with them and discuss how important the walk-ons are to college football.”
Now that he’s living in the world of NIL and unlimited transfers available to players, another part of Rhule’s job is dealing with rumors. Recently, there was a report about other programs contacting Nebraska’s starting quarterback, Dylan Raiola, and his camp to see if there’s potential for Raiola to enter the transfer portal.
On Monday night, Raiola took to social media on Monday and posted an Instagram story that read “All in! GBR,” a quiet way of shutting down those transfer rumors.
“He’s at practice right now, going through the game plan,” Rhule said. “…I think there’s always going to be rumors. I don’t deal in rumors. I deal in fact. So he’s here, he’s with us. He’s been all-in for us. He’s a good enough player that every school in the country should probably come try to recruit him. That’s the world we live in now.”
On Dec. 5, Nebraska’s starting running back, Emmett Johnson, announced on social media he would enter the transfer portal when it opened four days later on Monday, Dec. 9. Johnson, who enjoyed a strong three-game stretch to end the regular season, wound up never entering the portal as he made another announcement three days later on Sunday, Dec. 8, saying he would instead stay at Nebraska.
“We love Emmett. He’s a great player,” Rhule said. “In his heart, he’s always wanted to be a Husker.”
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