Cole Crotty, Luke Paff enter the transfer portal

It's mid-October and the portal is already getting some Division III talent. Thamel had the news.

Pete Thamel

@PeteThamel

Two top Division III players are entering the NCAA transfer portal. Johns Hopkins WR Cole Crotty caught 14 TDs and had 1,414 receiving yards in 2025. He has 3,260 career yards. Mount St. Joseph LB Luke Paff had 99 tackles last year and six interceptions in 2024.

Crotty isn't some guy who had 1 good year. He came to Baltimore in 2023, won Centennial Conference Rookie of the Year and kept piling up numbers. Going into his senior season he'd played 37 games and had 226 catches for 3,260 yards and 28 touchdowns. That's 2nd in Johns Hopkins history in yards and 4th in touchdowns. The Blue Jays won 36 games with him on the roster and made 2 D3 semifinals and a quarterfinal. He's 6-1 and 185 pounds, from Hermosa Beach, California, and he's said he models his game on Ladd McConkey and Jaxon Smith-Njigba.

Paff is the defensive half of this. He's a 6-5, 215-pound linebacker from Cincinnati who led Mount St. Joseph with 99 tackles in 2025 and made All-HCAC First Team. D3football.com put him on its preseason All-America Second Team this summer, and the Lions were picked to finish 2nd in the Heartland Collegiate Athletic Conference. Thamel also says he had 6 interceptions in 2024. Then came the part that explains the timing.

Pete Thamel

@PeteThamel

Both are out for the year with injury. They are repped by @esg_baker.

So neither of these guys is jumping ship halfway through a season to start somewhere new next Saturday. Their senior years are over because of injuries, and they're entering the portal now to line up where they'll play next. Both have the same rep, and that tells you this was planned and both of them want a shot at a bigger stage.

Crotty basically told everyone this was coming. Back in August he told PressBox that the NCAA's 5-for-5 eligibility rule gave him another year and that he could use it to transfer to a Division I school or go straight into draft prep. He also said the NFL is "definitely the goal of where I want to end up." Losing his senior year to an injury made that choice a lot easier.

What to watch: which FBS or FCS programs bite. A D3 receiver with more than 3,000 career yards is going to get looks from schools that want a proven slot guy without paying power-conference NIL money. A 6-5 linebacker with ball skills is the kind of body coaches like to develop. The real question is how fast both of them get healthy. Whoever lands them is betting on medical reports as much as on the tape.