How an ACC program stopped scrambling for transfers and started signing the players they already knew they wanted.
The Challenge
The portal doesn’t wait for any program to get organized.
Every personnel director knows which players might leave. Draft decisions, eligibility cliffs, unexpected transfers. Knowledge is not the problem. The problem is the gap between knowing a player might leave and having his replacement already identified.
At his previous stop, Connor Morgan, Director of Player Personnel at SMU, spent a month and a half manually combing through rosters watching every starting inside linebacker who played snaps. No filters. No shortcuts. Just names, hundreds of them, until they all ran together. When those names finally reached coaches, the conversations were abstract. Opinions on who was better. Debates without data. Then the portal compressed all of that into hours.
“There was no real starting point,” Morgan said. “You picked a team and started going through it. Hundreds of names, and eventually they all ran together.”
The gap between knowing a player might leave and having his replacement ready is not a talent gap. It is a process gap.
The Solution
If coaches already know the answer, the decision is easy.
SMU built its Teamworks Player Personnel workflow around one principle: the work happens before the portal opens, not after.
Personnel specialists monitor players at their positions throughout the season, flagging anyone who crosses set thresholds on Teamworks Player Personnel Player Traits and advanced stats. Those names move up the chain-of-command. The ones that hold up go on the board, in October, not December.
The player comparison feature inside Teamworks Player Personnel is what makes the coaching conversation work. When Morgan presents a target, he frames that player’s traits against someone already on the SMU roster. Not “this guy is good at contested catches” but “his grade is right around where our top WR is.” Coaches make faster decisions when the reference point is someone they already trust.
The Result
When the portal opened, SMU was already done.
16 total transfers. Most already scouted before anyone announced.
When a player SMU wanted entered the portal, the personnel staff already had the film and the position coach’s buy-in. There was nothing left to evaluate. There was only a decision to execute.
If mid-cycle, SMU needed a replacement at a position they weren’t expecting, the board was deep enough to handle it without starting over. Morgan has since extended the system into draft benchmarking, building average trait baselines from each draft class so coaching conversations have an NFL reference point too.
“Most of the players who entered the portal were already on our board, evaluated, and identified as targets because of Teamworks Player Personnel, Morgan said. “The majority of our class were signed within the first week of the portal opening. We knew how to value them and we knew what they could do for our program.”
Best practices from the SMU staff
Build replacement boards before the gap is official
Do not wait for a player to announce before identifying his replacement. Build profiles around the positions you know will need attention, using current player comparisons as the filter, and have the board ready before December. Starting from zero once the portal opens is how programs lose the players they already decided they wanted.
Anchor comparisons to players who’ve found success in your program
Generic rankings do not drive coaching decisions. When you present a portal target, frame his player traits relative to a player already on the roster that the position coach has evaluated with his own eyes. That anchoring converts abstract evaluation into a concrete thumbs-up.
