Offseason — portal net flow
Talent-weighted transfer-portal net flow for the 2026 recruiting cycle, standardized (mean-centered, scaled by standard deviation) across the 138 FBS teams that appeared in the portal. A positive value means a program added more talent-weighted value than it lost; a negative value means the reverse. The signal is applied as a small additive modifier (≈ 0.20 points of projection per standardized unit) on top of Bill Connelly's preseason SP+ — the only residual signal in the stack that is not already priced into his August number. The distribution is right-skewed by a handful of record classes and is not Gaussian; the sign and rank order are reliable, the exact standardized value is a scale marker rather than a probability statement.
Star chips reflect portal rating, not the player's high-school recruiting composite. A player who arrived as a 3★ high-school prospect can appear as a 5★ portal transfer after producing at the college level (Brendan Sorsby is the canonical case). The two ratings measure different things and are not expected to agree.
Portal weights: 5★ = 5.0, 4★ = 3.0, 3★ = 1.0, 2★ / unrated = 0.3. QB and edge positions weighted higher (1.5x / 1.3x). Immediate-eligibility transfers weighted 1.0; redshirt 0.5. Withdrawn entrants (players who returned to their original team) are excluded. Uncommitted portal entrants (destination not yet reported by CFBD) are shown as “uncommitted” rather than assigned to a school. See methodology for the full residual-signal story.