Basically, the name of the game now.
Just how prevalent are graduate transfers? From 2011 to 2017, the number of them tripled in women’s sports and increased by a factor of five in men’s sports. However, there were still only 660 graduate transfers identified in the 2017 Division I academic performance data out of nearly 110,000 Division I student-athletes, which equates to just over one-half of 1 percent.
Graduate transfers are most prevalent on a percentage basis in men’s basketball (2.3 percent of current players are grad transfers), women’s basketball, football, and men’s and women’s track and field. One percent of men’s football student-athletes were graduate transfers in 2017. However, the number of such cases has increased twelvefold since 2011 (17 in 2011, 211 in 2017). Trends across all Division I sports are shown in the full study results.