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Recruiting & Roster Building

The Transfer Portal

Players don't leave your program at random. Every player carries a happiness score that tracks how he feels about his situation week to week, and a bad enough number is what sends him into the portal.

What Actually Moves Happiness

A long list of factors feed into it week to week — playing time versus promise, winning, pay versus market value, injuries, homesickness, linemate chemistry, and more — all visible on a player's profile as named, color-coded mood factors. See Team Chemistry & Player Happiness for the full picture.

A strong program gets real slack here. A contender can bury a talented bench player far longer before he sours on his role, while a struggling team has almost no such cushion — patience runs out fast when the losses pile up.

Two Paths Into the Portal

Unhappiness. A player whose happiness drops low enough is flagged as unhappy; if it's still low once the offseason begins, he formally enters the portal.

Ambition. Even a content player can leave if he's clearly outgrown the program — a well-regarded talent playing well above his program's actual stature has a real shot at walking, even without a single bad mood factor. Lower-prestige programs get protection here too: the bar for "clearly outgrown" scales with how far below average your program's prestige is, so a mid-tier program doesn't bleed every solid player it develops the moment he's good.

Fixing It Before It's a Problem

You can offer an underpaid player a mid-season NIL raise. It's not available for every minor gap — the shortfall has to clear both a real percentage of his current deal and a real dollar amount — but when it applies, it clears the underpaid penalty immediately and gives happiness an instant lift. It's usually far cheaper than losing the player to the portal and rebuilding the position from scratch.

The Portal Window

Once departures and the draft are settled, a compressed multi-turn portal window opens (skipped entirely if nobody on your roster is at risk). During it, you can make a limited number of retention offers — a permanent raise that, if accepted, resets the player's happiness to a healthy level and keeps him on your roster.

A miserable enough player can reject a retention offer outright. If that happens, you can try again on a later turn, but expect to pay a real premium the second time — once a player turns you down, he doesn't forget it for the rest of the window. Anyone not retained by the window's close, yours or any other program's unhappy players, becomes available to every program, including yours, as an incoming transfer. Incoming transfers skew a little older than incoming freshmen and care more about landing the right role immediately than about geography.

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