Manny Diaz Rightfully Upset With Decisions NCAA Has to Make

The NCAA transfer portal is going to get going much sooner than it might seem in college football. Duke has a couple of games left in the regular season, hoping it can do enough to reach a bowl game. 

At 5-2, Duke has no excuse for not making a bowl game. It will have to win one of its next five games, taking on teams like Boston College and NC State, but then facing Miami, Clemson, and Wake Forest to end the year. 

As of now, Duke has to feel like it's in a pretty good position to make a decent bowl game, as long as it can take down Clemson and Wake Forest at the back end of the season. The chances of beating Miami seem somewhat slim.

Regardless, for Duke to get to be the team it's looking to be in the future, a lot of it is going to be focused on hitting the transfer portal as hard as possible. Duke found out the hard way last year when Darian Mensah left late in the offseason for Miami. 

He found himself in a better position to go win a national championship and make more money, which is exactly what he did. However, for head coach Manny Diaz, he understands that's something he has to worry about. He said that the NCAA pretty much has no idea what it's doing and that there's no guidance coming from the higher-ups running college football.

“It’s extraordinarily hard to look to the future, and extraordinarily frustrating because our regular season ends in five weeks, and we know the portal is coming, and we do not have any guidance, you know, in terms of what the rules of engagement are going to be going into ’27,” Diaz said, H/T On3. 

“And this is exactly the same thing that happened last December.”

Diaz is always going to be somebody who's very outspoken about these problems, and rightfully so after losing Mensah that late in the portal last year. Had it been earlier in the transfer cycle, I can understand why some wouldn't have been as frustrated with Mensah as they were. However, for him to leave when he did definitely left a sour taste in some fans' mouths.

In regard to what Diaz can do in the next couple of months, it's very likely that he's going to find himself in similar situations. 

He's in a position to land some very good players, but the reality is that Duke isn't going to have the same type of NIL funds in football to compete with some of the other top schools in the country.