Alabama A&M University head coach Connell Maynor has some strong opinions about how the transfer portal impacts his program, the SWAC and all lower-level football divisions.
“No, I’m not a fan of it because it has basically turned all lower-levels in to JUCOs, to where we develop players, as soon as they develop, they get NIL Deals and go somewhere else,” ” Maynor said in a recent interview with Urban Sports Scene. “We’re just glorified JUCOs right now.”
Maynor, who led Alabama A&M to the 2021 SWAC title in the spring, said that there was one way he thought players should be able to leave freely via the transfer portal. He said that the movement of a head coach should allow players the opportunity to move freely.
“Mr. Kiffin, Lane Kiffin, could take a job and be there for a year and leave, then take another job, don’t even coach a game and leave. Now it puts the coaches in a bad spot, to where they say ‘the coaches can leave anytime they want to. They don’t have stay.’ Then the NCAA says ‘they’re right. Then they open it up now to where the players can leave. It should be – only if your coach leaves that you can leave.”
It makes sense that he feels that way since that’s what Maynor did as a player. After leading Winston-Salem State to the CIAA title as a quarterback in 1987, he followed his coach Bill Hayes to Nearby North Carolina A&T where he won a MEAC title in 1991.
He’s also lost several key players to the transfer portal over the past few seasons, including Houston Texans rookie Tank Dell.
There is some irony in Maynor’s take, however. He went 46-5 in four seasons at WSSU from 2010 through 2013, winning back-to-back CIAA titles and making it to the Division II NCAA title game. This was pre-transfer portal, but many of his best players were transfers from the Division I level.
Fast forward a decade, and his 2022 Alabama A&M team featured more than two dozen former FBS transfers. Unfortunately, Alabama A&M University won just four games despite all that talent.
The 2022 season was a disappointing one for Alabama A&M University football, but Connell Maynor prefers to look at what was gained instead of the seven losses the team took compared to four wins. The team started off the season with games against two FBS programs: Alabama-Birmingham and Troy.
“I don’t look at the record because we do stuff always from the top. From the top I’m talking about the AD, the president, and myself,” Maynor said. “We looked at the schedule, we knew it was possible that we could start off 1-3, or 0-4. We had two money games in there, and we took those money games and we got a brand new turf that we only practice on three days. We’ve got new locker rooms going in, we’ve got projects for a practice facility with grass and a turf with a top over the top. And it takes money to do those things.”
Maynor says it’s about sacrificing for the greater good of the program.
“It takes money to do those things. I always tell people: ‘if we could play three cupcakes, three D2s – Edward Waters – the first three games, we’d have been 7-4.”
For the record, Alabama A&M has two Division II schools on its schedule in 2023. It will host Lane College on Sept. 9 and Tuskegee University for homecoming on Sept. 30.