Tampering Defines College Baseball’s Transfer Portal Era. Can It Be Fixed?

Hope is fragile in Normal, Illinois.

Every spring, Illinois State stretches toward a postseason that almost never arrives, a dream so rare it feels borrowed when it comes. Just four times in the program’s history have the Redbirds reached the NCAA Tournament, only twice this century. And yet, each close call seems to reset the clock, convincing players, coaches and fans that maybe next year will be different.

In 2024, belief felt less like hope and more like certainty. Illinois State had its best season in half a decade, surging to the brink of the field of 64 before falling to Evansville in the Missouri Valley semifinal. The loss lingered, but came with undeniable promise—that the Redbirds had a core worth waiting for, a group seasoned enough to return stronger and finally push beyond the league’s ceiling.

But almost before the campaign’s dust had settled, the roster dissolved. Four regular contributors entered the transfer portal and quickly made high-major commitments. What looked like the beginning of a breakthrough instead became the outline of a cautionary tale.

“We got slaughtered by the portal,” head coach Steve Holm told Baseball America.

The aftermath was a season that played to dampened expectations. Illinois State opened with just three wins in its first 13 games in 2025, the low point a pair of blowouts at Oklahoma State—16-1 and 18-1 over a miserable 14 innings—that underscored how far the program had fallen from its promise of the year before.

To its credit, the team steadied. The Redbirds clawed back to finish 28-28, a .500 mark that suggested resilience but not resurgence. For Holm, the numbers mattered less than the hollowness of what could have been. Before his team had even played a game, the ceiling had already been lowered.

“We had really high hopes for that group in 2025,” Holm said, “and basically overnight, it was gone.”

Illinois State has become one of the faces of modern turnover. The offseason that followed 2024 swooped through like a tornado, picking up pieces and scattering them across the country. The pain continued a year later when five key contributors transferred to power-conference programs.

For players and their agents, exploring transfer options can be a rational move. A change of scenery can mean better competition, more exposure, or simply a clearer path to playing time. In many cases, a jump to a bigger program improves draft stock, maximizes NIL potential and places a player in an environment that accelerates development. For some, it isn’t disloyalty—it’s opportunity.

But this is the reality now.

“It makes it very difficult because you don’t know who you’re going to be year in and year out,” Holm said.

What drives players to transfer has been as frustrating for coaches like Holm as the fact that the players leave at all.

Tampering, he and many others say, is often to blame.

But the meaning of tampering splinters widely depending on who you ask to define it. One coach’s tampering is another’s survival strategy.

“If you’re calling a kid who’s not in the portal, you’re breaking the rules,” Tennessee coach Tony Vitello said. “That’s wrong. But when kids and families are already asking questions, it’s hard—I’d actually go as far as to say it’s completely impossible to pretend that conversation isn’t happening.”

In an agent-driven landscape, those inquiries are more often brought to coaches than initiated by them, according to Vitello and over a dozen of his peers. For coaches, ignoring those calls doesn’t preserve integrity—it concedes ground. Every player who slips away becomes someone else’s gain, and every hesitation risks falling a step behind in an arms race that never pauses.

“I’m not going to pick up and say, ‘We can’t talk because it’s beneath me,’” one SEC coach said plainly. “I’m paid to build a team and expected to go to Omaha. I can’t afford to not talk to an agent who calls me.”

Vitello understands that bind, too.

“What am I supposed to say if somebody calls me and asks if we’d be interested in a kid who hasn’t even hit the portal yet?” he asked rhetorically. “No? That’s not realistic.”

Some mid-major coaches, Sacramento State head coach Reggie Christiansen among them, see and understand the logic. They know the rules exist in theory but not in practice, and that survival in the current system often requires bending to its realities.

Technically, tampering is forbidden. Practically, it has become the unwritten language of the sport.

“I think it’s important to say, I’m not blaming the SEC or the ACC or any of those schools for doing what they’re doing,” Christiansen told BA. “They’re doing their jobs. They’re trying to win, and I respect that. I would probably do the same thing if I were in their shoes. But for us, it makes it really difficult.”

NCAA bylaw 13.1.1.3 states the following regarding tampering: “An athletics staff member or other representative of the institution’s athletics interests shall not communicate or make contact with the student-athlete of another NCAA Division I institution, or any individual associated with the student-athlete (e.g., family member, scholastic or nonscholastic coach, advisor), directly or indirectly, without first obtaining authorization through the notification of transfer process.

“Before making contact, directly or indirectly, with a student-athlete of an NCAA Division II or Division III institution, or an NAIA four-year collegiate institution, an athletics staff member or other representative of the institution’s athletics interests shall comply with the rule of the applicable division or the NAIA rule for making contact with a student-athlete.”

Some schools across various sports—mostly football—have self-reported minor tampering infractions but few have been hit with major penalties, including in baseball where such cases have been few and far between. Northwestern in July of 2024 agreed to penalties that included one year of probation for the school, a fine and recruiting restrictions in alignment with the Level II-mitigated classification after recruiting violations that included “tampering with a prospect who had not yet been entered into the Transfer Portal.”

No matter the vantage point—whether it’s a high-major coach plucking talent from smaller programs or a mid-major coach fighting just to keep a core intact—there is no disagreement that the current system is broken.

The reason it persists is just as widely acknowledged: a not-so-stunning lack of enforcement from a weakened NCAA, an organization with atrophying power in an NIL-ruled world.

“There has to be more governance,” one coach said. “Right now, nobody’s watching. Nobody’s listening. And everybody knows it.”

That absence of oversight has created an environment where participation in some form of tampering is less a choice than a necessity. Ignore the calls, and you fall behind. But play along, and you perpetuate the cycle. For coaches at every level, those are the only two doors the portal seems to offer.

Many mid-major coaches believe a third option should exist: contracts. If players could be locked into programs for at least two years, the churn might finally slow. Christiansen compared it to what already happens in the professional ranks.

“That’s how every other business works, and they’re certainly turning it into a business, right?” he said. “If you’re paying people, it’s a business. In pro sports they buy out arbitration years, they overpay to lock players in longer. I don’t see why college baseball shouldn’t move toward multi-year deals, too.”

Vitello, who as a high-major coach often hears accusations of tampering from opposing fanbases, also wants a solution. For him, the answer begins with accountability.

“There needs to be an oversight committee,” he said. “Something with the power to actually punish offenders. Until then, people are going to do what they feel they have to do, because the risk is basically zero.”

In the meantime, mid-major programs are left with few options other than to keep battling—or embrace the inevitability of turnover.

Sacramento State has modeled the latter. When shortstop Wehiwa Aloy won the 2025 Golden Spikes Award after a standout season at Arkansas, the Hornets used the moment to remind recruits of where his journey began: Sacramento State, where he had been a record-breaking and award-winning freshman in 2023.

When Aloy was named SEC Player of the Year, Sacramento State celebrated that, too.

“[Wehiwa Aloy] got his start with us,” the program tweeted. “We can help your dreams come true in Sacramento.”

Christiansen, who shared that he was aware that high-major were interested in Aloy partway through the 2023 season, said acknowledging his former infielder’s success has been positive in his team’s efforts.

“We put it out there right away,” Christiansen said. “It helped us in recruiting to say, look, he started here. He developed here. If you want to come in and make your mark before moving on, this is a place you can do it.”

Not every coach agrees with that approach.

Holm, a close friend of Christiansen’s, bristled at the idea of celebrating departures.

“Reggie and I talk all the time,” Holm said. “I get what he’s doing, but I could never put out there, ‘please come here so you can leave.’ I just can’t do it.”

What separates the two friends is less philosophy than circumstance.

Christiansen has chosen to lean into the realities of the market, using Aloy as proof that Sacramento State can still be a launching pad. Holm, meanwhile, refuses to frame his program as a temporary stop. Both are searching for ways to adapt, neither entirely satisfied with the answers.

It leaves college baseball in a place as unsettled as the rosters that define it. Enforcement remains toothless, solutions remain theoretical, and the churn continues to redraw the map every summer. The sport has never offered more opportunity, but it has rarely felt less stable.

At Illinois State, that instability cuts especially deep. Hope still flickers each spring, fragile as ever. But as long as the game’s unwritten language endures, the Redbirds—and so many programs like them—will step into every season knowing just how quickly that hope can vanish.