2023 Transfer Portal Rankings Review: Defensive Backs
Welcome to the final part of our series looking back at the official UWDP transfer rankings of 2023 to see how well it performed given how players performed for their new teams this fall. Previous editions focused on the quarterbacks, the offensive skill positions, and the offensive line, and the defensive line/linebackers.
Now, it’s time to finish off our review of the positions by looking at the defensive backs.
2023 DB Transfer Rankings by Performance
First of all we have to acknowledge that the very tip top of the rankings gets altered a bit because of who the #1 player was. Travis Hunter started at both WR and CB for Colorado and I felt it was only fair to include him at both spots since that’s how much production Colorado got. However, you can cut his total in roughly half if you’re trying to figure out how much he did on just the defensive side of the ball. The games he missed due to injury were offset by playing two positions overall but he was less impactful as just a CB because of that.
Beyond that it’s pretty much a complete crapshoot. Every bracket from the 60s up to the 80s have very similar totals. Their average starts are all within 0.5 and their average PFF grade is within 3.0. The productivity score technically went down a little bit through those levels. That’s not what we’re hoping to see but showed that if you had any player with at least a 60 transfer grade last offseason then you had a good shot at solid but not spectacular production.
There’s a slight dropoff with the 50-59 range mostly on their own and then once again the results are practically equal from anyone with a transfer grade below 50.0. Some of those near the bottom put up their numbers at FCS programs but it’s clear that the results for the defensive backs is much less clear cut than they have ben at other positions throughout this series.
Biggest FBS Underachievers
1. CB Darian “Duce” Chestnut- Syracuse to LSU, 89.3 transfer grade, 4.6 productivity
2. CB Tony Grimes- North Carolina to Texas A&M, 83.1 transfer grade, 0.0 productivity score
3. CB Lorenzo Styles- Notre Dame to Ohio State, 80.2 transfer grade, 0.2 productivity score
4. CB Tayvion Beasley- Jackson State to San Diego State, 78.3 transfer grade, 0.0 productivity score
5. CB Latrell McCutchin- USC to Houston, 78.1 transfer grade, 0.0 productivity score
6. CB Smoke Bouie- Texas A&M to Georgia, 76.1 transfer grade, 0.0 productivity score
7. CB Fred Davis- Clemson to Central Florida, 74.3 transfer grade, 0.3 productivity score
Yikes. That’s a gruesome list. That makes 7 cornerbacks with at least a 74 transfer grade to have essentially no impact at their next school. No wonder there wasn’t much of a trend in the above section. There were only 23 such players across all position groups and cornerbacks led the way (next most were RB with 5 and WR with 4).
Here are some of the explanations as best as I can manage.
-Four players ended up being one and done at their new stops and went back into the transfer portal already this cycle.
- Duce Chestnut had some sort of off-field issue that was never fully disclosed by LSU and he ended up away from the team and “inactive” for the majority of the season. There was no indication of issues prior to his transfer. He is transferring back to Syracuse.
- Tony Grimes missed the entire season due to an undisclosed injury and initially committed to Michigan State this winter only to switch to UNLV. He was a former high four-star recruit who the Huskies recruited coming out of high school.
- Smoke Bouie is also once again in the portal after he was arrested last offseason and dismissed/parted ways from the team before the season started. We’ll see if he gets a second chance in college football.
- Fred Davis just never cracked the rotation at UCF after 3 years playing well in about 10 snaps per game at Clemson.
-Styles had his production in college at wide receiver but decided to transfer and switch to cornerback. I didn’t really know how to handle that but if I had said I’m not including any of his college stats at WR then his grade would’ve dropped by a lot and become more realistic.
-Beasley transferred to Colorado to follow Deion but then transferred back out a few months later and was ineligible last year.
-And finally, I haven’t been able to find any reason why McCutchin never played at Houston.
Put it all together and that’s 2 off-field issues, 2 production failures, 1 injury, 1 ineligible, and 1 position change. So only at most 3 out of the 7 were a true failure of the system and the rest were bad luck concentrated at the same position group.
Biggest FBS Overachievers
1. CB Damel Hickman- East Carolina to Georgia Southern, 18.1 transfer grade, 57.7 productivity score
2. S Simeon Blair- Arkansas to Memphis, 41.3 transfer grade, 75.6 productivity score
3. S Tate Hallock- Michigan State to Western Michigan, 20.1 transfer grade, 51.0 productivity score
4. S Dylan Lawrence- Mississippi State to Southern Miss, 20.0 transfer grade, 46.9 productivity score
5. CB Tyrell Raby- Memphis to Middle Tennessee, 27.1 transfer grade, 52.8 productivity score
All of the top-6 FBS overachievers did so at the G5 level which isn’t necessarily a surprise but hasn’t been the case at every position group. Four players above had a transfer grade of between 18 and 27 which essentially means they were all either 2 or low 3-star recruits and had just about 0 prior college experience on the field. Yet they averaged 630 snaps played this past year with a 66.5 PFF grade where 60 is usually considered average. So none of them was an All-American type performer but all turned into good starters essentially out of nowhere.
The highest ranked overachiever at a P5 school was CB Ja’Quan Sheppard who went from Cincinnati to Maryland and started 13 games with an 81.0 PFF grade after putting up 9 pass breakups and 3 sacks. We’ll get into the comparison to 247’s rankings next but props to them that they had Sheppard as a four-star transfer while my system just didn’t see it with a 46 grade. This is another case where weighting the most recent season may have helped because he started every game for the Bearcats in 2022 but barely played his first 3 years in college so his stats looked much less impressive if you took into account his entire career. I generally think that is more correct than ignoring previous years but hurt there.
Comparison to 247’s Rankings
There were 44 defensive backs to wind up being named a four-star recruit in 247 Sports’ Transfer Rankings this past season. Since the definitions between safety and nickel corner are some times a little loose, I’m comparing 247’s four-stars to the top-44 defensive backs in my transfer grades from last year.
Here’s what the average profile for the 247 four-stars looked like this past fall on the field:
6.2 starts, 417.0 defensive snaps, 63.5 PFF grade, 36.0 productivity score
31.4 tackles, 9.3 defensive stops, 0.8 INTs, 2.6 PBUs
Here’s how the same # of players at the top of my transfer grades performed:
6.0 starts, 400.7 defensive snaps, 60.7 PFF grade, 34.2 productivity score
29.3 tackles, 8.3 defensive stops, 0.8 INTs, 2.6 PBUs
At every position group up until now you could at least make a convincing argument that my rankings outperformed 247’s and at worse tied. But not here. It wasn’t by much but 247 had a clean sweep on me with slightly higher numbers across the board. Given what we’ve seen so far that shouldn’t exactly be a surprise since my system clearly really struggled with the defensive backs this year.
So what went wrong? Part of it is what you could see in the underachievers section. 247 didn’t include any of Beasley, McCutchin, or Davis as four-star players which meant that I had an extra 3 complete duds added in to my total. 9 of the 44 players in my four-star range finished with a productivity score below 5.0 which meant essentially 20% were total busts in year one. That number was 7 for 247’s four-stars but all 4 of the ones they tripped up on that I didn’t played at least a little bit even if they never started.
Conclusion
Looking at the P5 transfers in the above graph should give you a sense for how many players ended up having virtually no impact after transferring school among defensive backs. The X-axis is littered with players to play 0 snaps at their new school. It’s certainly possible to find a fantastic defensive back out there but there were a lot of misses last season.
In all of these position breakdowns I’ve measuring the r-squared value for the graph above which tells how much of the variation in player production is explained by my transfer grades. The defensive backs have been one of the worst performing groups with a 0.13 or 13% value. That number is slightly higher for safeties than corners but they were essentially the same.
That improved up to 14.2% if you exclude FCS schools which have a lot of high performers with low transfer grades because they likely wouldn’t have seen the field at higher levels of competition. It drops to 12.4% though if you only include power conference schools which has been the case for almost every position group.
The bottom line is that my system didn’t do very well trying to place defensive backs this year. I’m not convinced that’s going to be the case every year. Unless court rulings change it looks like all transfers will be eligible which prevents second-time transfers from getting a zero by not being able to play at all. Some amount of players will suffer injuries or get into legal trouble this year but it does seem as if an unusually high number of top transfers in the DB grouping had significant but unforeseeable setbacks.
