The introduction of the transfer portal into college sports, particularly football and basketball, created an interesting example of the prisoner's dilemma. Coaches and programs can choose to cooperate and minimize their use of the portal, or they can defect and seek out transfer players. For our purposes, let us consider only two programs. There is a Pareto-efficient outcome where each decides not use the portal (cooperate). However, each program has an individual incentive to defect; using the portal while the other does not gives them a competitive advantage. Since each faces this incentive, they defect and are both worse off than they would be had they each cooperated. What if they didn't reach this equilibrium?
Let's consider a comparison of two coaches currently participating in the transfer portal dilemma: Curt Cignetti and Dabo Swinney. Cignetti turned around an Indiana team that went 3-9 in the year prior to his arrival to a 16-0 national champion in just two years. He did this with a roster that added 52(!) transfers during this period. Dabo Swinney has been stubborn in his refusal to allocate resources towards the portal in favor of developing high school recruits, taking only 3 transfers over the same period. Swinney has fallen from the heights of his pre-portal success and Clemson has turned into a middling program. As noble as Swinney's motivations may be, Cignetti's defection and Swinney's insistence on cooperation have created the outcome we may expect. Cignetti's behavior demonstrates the benefit programs can gain from defection while others continue to cooperate.
