Every athlete who leaves takes sunk investment with them and forces replacement spend to get back to baseline. Enter your numbers and see the financial impact of portal and transfer attrition on your program.
Your numbers say roster churn is costing your program real money. The question is not whether you can afford to address it. The question is: do you know where your roster is most exposed, and why?
The PSYENCE Embeddedness Diagnostic (PED™) is a self scout for your roster. It measures the four forces behind whether an athlete stays or heads for the portal, Sacrifice, Fit, Links, and Promise Integrity, and shows you by group where the door is open while you can still do something about it.
Framework: Cascio & Boudreau utility analysis methodology adapted for collegiate athletics. Sunk investment captures the total value already committed to the departing athlete. Replacement cost captures the incremental expense to acquire, onboard, and develop a replacement.
Revenue Sharing: House v. NCAA settlement, approved June 6, 2025. Annual cap of $20.5M per school for 2025-26, increasing to ~$32M over 10 years. Power 4 schools expected to max out. Football receives ~65.6% of allocation per Opendorse data.
NIL Data: Opendorse "NIL at Four" annual report, 2025. Total college football NIL spending estimated at $1.9B for 2025-26 including revenue sharing. Two-thirds of P4 football players earn less than $10K in third-party NIL.
Transfer Portal Data: 10,500+ football players entered the portal in the Jan 2026 15-day window. 31% of FBS scholarship portal entrants had previously transferred.
Re-Transfer Rate: 31% of FBS scholarship players in the 2024-25 portal cycle had previously transferred. (ESPN)
70% Finding: AD Advisors and Timark Partners study of 14,000+ D-I men's basketball portal entries since 2019 found 70% of Tier 1 (Power 4 + Big East) transfers moved down or did not find a new school. 65% across all D-I.
NAIA Economics: NAIA Advantage: $10,500 published net return per student-athlete. NAIA Return on Athletics® research (NAIA blog, Jan 2026): average net return rose 14.4% in 2023-24 to $4.6M per member institution, with retention a positive driver. NAIA preset scholarship value models net revenue per athlete: ~$9,000 NACUBO-discounted tuition (56.3% first-time discount rate, 2024-25) plus ~$10,000 housing, food, and fees (College Board 2024). Revenue sharing is preset to $0 because the House settlement does not apply to NAIA institutions. NIL is preset to $0 as a conservative default: the NAIA has permitted NIL since October 2020, but deals are typically small, local, and third-party funded rather than a program budget line, and no verified per-athlete average exists; enter your own figure if your program commits NIL dollars. NAIA transfers run on written releases and 10-day notification, not the NCAA portal. Replace any preset with your own numbers and every figure recalculates.
Embeddedness Research: Doctoral research (Dannehl, 2020). Jiang et al. (2012, Journal of Applied Psychology) meta-analysis, 65 studies, N=42,907. Li et al. (2025, Personnel Review) meta-analysis, 250 studies, 111,000+ participants, confirming Sacrifice as the consistently strongest dimension.
