Sports Illustrated’s review of BYU football transfers since 2020 found that leaving does not always pay off. Of the 81 players it tracked, 52% moved to another FBS school, and among that group, 17% would have been better off staying at BYU.
That finding lands in the middle of a sport where staffs now spend as much time keeping players as replacing them. BYU was no exception last January, when it invested a lot of time and NIL resources to keep every projected starter who still had eligibility, because in football the easiest roster to lose is the one you thought you had already secured. The new review shows that even after all that work, some players still walk away — and not every move improves the next stop.
Harrison Taggart is the clearest example of that risk. He played a lot of snaps for BYU in 2024 before transferring to Cal for the 2025 season, and his playing time and production were cut in half there. Keelan Marion made a different move after Spring Camp last year, leaving as a starting wide receiver and landing at Miami. The contrast between those two exits helps explain why portal decisions are so hard to read in real time.
The full set of departures paints a sharper picture of what happened after BYU. Sports Illustrated found that 28% of the 81 transfers moved down to the FCS ranks to finish their college careers, while 20% did not land on another college football roster at all. That leaves just over half who stayed at the FBS level, but the 17% figure is the one that cuts deepest: it shows that a meaningful slice of the players who found another FBS home still ended up worse off than they were in Provo.
That is the friction point inside every portal success story. Schools pour time and NIL money into retention, players chase new roles and new offers, and the result is not always upward movement. The analysis does not say which specific former BYU players improved most after leaving, but it does make one thing plain: moving on is not the same as moving up.
