Now it was time for Curt Cignetti to do some Googling.
After taking over as head coach at Indiana in December of 2023, Cignetti had a program but not a team. Most of the Hoosiers’ best players were in the transfer portal. He needed to find replacements, most importantly a quarterback. So he started digging into the available names in the portal.
“You know, the first thing I do is I Google ESPN, see what their career stats are,” Cignetti said.
Cignetti’s search uncovered one of the steals of the season.
Kurtis Rourke, the former MAC player of the year at Ohio, led surprising Indiana to arguably its best season ever as the nation’s highest-rated passer. The 10th-seeded Hoosiers (11-1) face No. 7 Notre Dame on Friday night in the first College Football Playoff game in the new 12-team format.
Arizona State also unearthed a gem in Sam Leavitt, who had thrown just 23 passes in his one season at Michigan State before landing the portal last year. Leavitt and the fourth-seeded Big 12 champion Sun Devils (11-2) will face the Clemson-Texas winner in the Peach Bowl on Jan. 1.
The list of other teams that shopped in the transfer portal’s bargain bin and came away happy includes Minnesota with Max Brosmer, Cincinnati with Brendan Sorsby and Pitt with Eli Holstein. None made big headlines when they signed, but all ended up having solid seasons.
There is a certain amount of good fortune that goes into landing a productive starting quarterback via transfer, whether you’re paying at the top of the market like Oregon (Dillon Gabriel) and Notre Dame (Riley Leonard) did or hunting for a deal.
The lessons from those who reached into the QB grab bag and found value:
- Be prepared.
- Know what skill set fits not just your scheme but your culture.
- Identify your guy, get that guy.
- Maybe most important: Be self-aware.
“You got to really have a pretty realistic idea of who you got a shot to get,” Cignetti said.
In this relatively new, evolving and unstructured era of college athletes being compensated for their name, image and likeness rights, getting a handle on what exactly an individual player is making is nearly impossible.
Personnel staffers granted anonymity to discuss the market told The Athletic that although the top available quarterbacks have made upwards of $1 million in recent years, if a team has a productive starter making six figures, it should generally be viewed as a good deal. Blake Lawrence, whose company Opendorse works with dozens of schools on NIL-related activities, said about $100,000 per victory is a solid return for a starting quarterback at the Power 4 level. Anything better than that is a bargain.
Knowing which racks to browse is an important place to start for most programs.
Minnesota director of player personnel Marcus Hendrickson scanned through his notes from last year’s portal cycle as he was doing a phone interview in November.
“I think there’s 25 quarterbacks on here that I graded,” he said. “I go down to some of these guys on the bottom list, I’m like, you know, probably can’t afford this guy.”
The Gophers found their guy in the Football Championship Subdivision ranks. Brosmer played four years at New Hampshire and entered the portal with a clear goal of moving up for his final college season.
“The day that I entered the portal, I think that I had, like, 480 text messages from people that I don’t have contacts from,” Brosmer said.
Minnesota had planned to sign a transfer quarterback, but its urgency soared when starter Athan Kaliakmanis decided to go into portal right after the season. Kaliakmanis ended up at Rutgers, which went 7-5, including a victory against Minnesota.
Gophers offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach Greg Harbaugh liked Brosmer’s accuracy and pocket poise. He also found something of a kindred spirit in Brosmer, who understood that a wrong decision this season would be a mistake he could not erase.
“I knew I could not miss on this quarterback, and he had that same mindset, too. He couldn’t miss, I couldn’t miss,” Harbaugh said.
Minnesota went hard after Brosmer, who quickly felt at home in coach P.J. Fleck’s program.
“I think other teams probably waited on Max,” Hendrickson said. “We saw what fit us, and we went for it and we attacked it, and we got him committed. Whereas I think other other schools liked Max. I think other schools really liked Max, but they wanted to see, because the FCS portal (opened) a week earlier than the FBS portal (in 2023). I think other teams wanted to see what else kind of came to fruition.”
Brosmer also wasn’t looking for a big payday.
“Anywhere I went I was going to get more money than I was going to get at New Hampshire, right?” Brosmer said. “There’s no NIL, really, at that level.”
Minnesota finished 7-5, and the 6-foot-2, 225-pound Brosmer, running the Gophers’ low-risk offense, completed 66.8 percent of his passes with 17 touchdowns and five interceptions.
Cincinnati felt similarly about Sorsby. “We had a good idea that we valued him higher than the rest of the country did,” Bearcats general manager Zach Grant said.
Unlike Minnesota, which solely focused on filling the position for 2024, Cincinnati coach Scott Satterfield directed his personnel people to find a quarterback the program could build around for multiple years.
Indiana seemed to be heading for a coaching change through much of 2023 as Tom Allen’s final team slid to 3-9. Coaching changes tend to lead to transfers. That’s why Sorsby, who played in 10 games as a redshirt freshman but only worked his way into the starting lineup late in the season, was on Cincinnati’s radar.
Sorsby’s performances at Penn State and Illinois — a total of six touchdown passes, two TD runs and two interceptions — stood out to Satterfield, who preferred a dual-threat quarterback for his system.
Within a few days, Cincinnati contacted Sorsby. Satterfield and quarterbacks coach Pete Thomas visited him in Knoxville, Tenn., then set up a visit for him to Cincinnati.
“Essentially did not let him leave until he said he was coming to be a Bearcat,” Satterfield said. ”We knew there’s not a lot of options out there.
“If you hesitate, you will not get ’em.”
Cincinnati improved to 5-7 in Year 2 under Satterfield, though the Bearcats ended the season on a five-game losing streak. Still, Sorsby mostly delivered, passing for 2,813 yards and 18 touchdowns and running for 447 and nine.
Sorsby’s departure from Indiana left Cignetti with a thin depth chart when he arrived from James Madison. Cignetti’s research led him to Rourke, who was in a similar situation to Brosmer, with one year of eligibility remaining to put himself in position for a potential professional career.
Rourke was having a great year for Ohio in 2022 when a torn ACL in mid-November ended his season. Rourke was determined to return for the start of the 2023 season, and he did, but rehabbing had consumed his offseason. Instead of working on his game, he worked on getting healthy.
He played in 11 games for the Bobcats and was just OK. After throwing for 3,257 yards and 25 touchdowns with a 69.1 completion percentage in 2022, Rourke passed for 2,207 and 11 with a 63.5 completion percentage in 2023.
Instead of turning pro, he figured he’d cash in his COVID-19 waiver for an extra year of eligibility to play a sixth season of college football.
“I believed in myself and knew that I could be that hot commodity, be that player for a team. But I knew that based on the year I had that I didn’t have a lot of, or as much, talking power as other guys in the portal,” Rourke said.
When Rourke says going to Indiana was a business decision, he insists that it wasn’t about NIL. He said he didn’t even bring that up until Cignetti did. Rourke said he prioritized transferring up in conference, playing on a winning team and finding a scheme that fit his strengths as a pocket passer who makes good, quick decisions.
“He reminded me a little bit of Phillip Rivers, who I was with at NC State,” Cignetti said.
Cignetti sold Rourke on a system that has been friendly to different styles of quarterbacks during his numerous coaching stops.
“Our last four quarterbacks prior to Kurtis were all player of the year in the conference on offense. The previous two were one-year G5 transfers, just like him,” Cignetti said.
Rourke said the sense of urgency to make a decision works both ways. He drew interest from Wake Forest, too, but then the Demon Deacons signed another quarterback (Hank Bachmeier from Louisiana Tech), and Cignetti made it clear he couldn’t wait long to get an answer from Rourke.
“I definitely felt like if I didn’t commit that day, then a couple days later, it might not be on the table,” Rourke said. “Also seeing on social media and everything, other quarterbacks starting to commit and those places having their guys for the next year. So the opportunities and places to go was getting a little bit smaller, slowly.”
Business has been booming this season for the Hoosiers and Rourke, who finished ninth in the Heisman voting.
At Arizona State, the evaluation of Leavitt by offensive coordinator Marcus Arroyo was much like the evaluation of a high school prospect, only done in a fraction of the time. There was not much to be gained from Leavitt’s limited appearances at Michigan State last year.
Arroyo said he put in calls to some of the top-of-the-market quarterbacks and that Arizona State wasn’t limited when it came to NIL. But for a program coming off a 3-9 season, it can be hard to get high-quality players who have only a year left. Like Satterfield at Cincinnati, Arroyo preferred a younger player with multiple years of eligibility.
Arroyo said a five-hour meeting with the quarterback and his father during Leavitt’s day-and-a-half-long visit to Tempe won him over.
“There was just a unique feel in regards to the temperament and the personality he had as we sat here and kind of got to know each other for whatever it was, 36 hours,” Arroyo said.
Leavitt, who was a four-star recruit from Oregon, has thrown for 2,663 yards and 24 touchdowns this season, and the Sun Devils have lost only one game in which he played. If Leavitt was a bargain, he won’t be for much longer.
Lawrence said the going rate for quarterbacks is on the rise in college football with revenue sharing with players on the horizon in 2025 as a result of the House v. NCAA settlement. A good player who was making in the six figures in 2024 will almost certainly be able to command a million next year.
Portal bargains might be harder to find, but smart shoppers could still be rewarded.
“We know what works here, what doesn’t work here, what type of players work here,” Minnesota’s Hendrickson said. “And I think because we know who we are, it helps us identify guys that are going to fit and have success here.”
(Top illustration: Meech Robinson for The Athletic; Photos: Matthew Visinsky, Joe Robbins /Icon Sportswire via Getty Images, Dylan Buell / Getty Images)
