CHARLOTTE – Every coach of a non-power school can hear the drumbeat.

It’s the bittersweet reality of a player thriving in their program.

In an era of college football where rosters turn over rapidly and sharks in major conferences are constantly swirling, coaches outside the major conferences must brace for their highest performers to be poached every offseason.

Tulane won nine games last season, and their quarterback — star freshman Darian Mensah — left for Duke in December on a two-year deal worth a reported $8 million. Sixty of Tulane’s 116 players — 51.7 percent — are new in 2025.

“Every year, we all have a brand-new team and a brand-new roster,” Tulane coach Jon Sumrall said.

“That’s not just me. That’s everybody. That’s normal now.”

The fears that the sport’s lower levels could serve as a farm system for larger programs have come to fruition. Of the 22 players named to the American Conference first or second teams who returned to college in 2025, 13 transferred, including 12 to power-conference schools.

“It’s really hard. You turn around and go, ‘Wait, we only have three returning starters? And every year we’re gonna have a new quarterback?” Memphis coach Ryan Silverfield said. “If you have a guy who starts and thrives for you at left tackle, it’s hard to afford to keep him around.”

In the four years since name, image and likeness (NIL) money flooded into the sport and instant eligibility for transfers threw rosters into chaos, coaches at the sport’s lower levels have had to develop new methods for player retention.

They can’t just resign themselves to losing their best players each year.

Here are five things they say they’re doing to fight off the major-conference goliaths.

“You can’t take anything personal. But you do,” Memphis coach Ryan Silverfield said. (Stu Boyd II / The Commercial Appeal / USA Today Network via Imagn Images)

Building trust and connection

First-year Temple coach K.C. Keeler has a mandate for his staff. It’s simple. It’s small. But it’s foundational.

If it’s a player’s birthday or he’s having surgery for any reason, he’s getting a text or call from every member of Keeler’s staff.

“If a player is going to leave, I want him to feel like he’s leaving the whole building, not just a coach,” said Keeler, who won a FCS national title at Sam Houston in 2021 and guided the program’s transition into FBS before leaving for Temple in December. “That makes it harder.”

He doesn’t want players siloed into their position group.

Zach Kittley, a first-time head coach taking over at Florida Atlantic, has two key pillars of his program: Treat each other like family and have fun. That’s with an aim toward retention.

“If you create an environment guys want to be in, it’s going to be easier to keep guys,” he said.

That can create a delicate balance for coaches who want to make spending full days in the facility enjoyable without inviting too casual an atmosphere.

“Your standards and norms in the program culturally cannot change,” Traylor said. “You have to stand on the foundation you believe in.”

Traylor, 46-20 in his first five seasons at UTSA, has recognized that winning helps both keep players and attract other players. As does a track record of putting players into the NFL. If a coaching staff has done it in the past, players will feel less pressure to leave for a bigger program to maximize their NFL stock, Traylor said.

And there’s another aspect to maintaining trust within a locker room: How coaches handle it when players do leave.

It’s natural and easy to take any player transferring as a rejection, even amid the financial realities of the sport that put Group of Five programs at a disadvantage.

By now, Traylor can usually see on a player’s face the second he enters his office if he’s preparing to tell him he’s leaving.

“You can’t be defensive or sensitive about it. It’s like, ‘Hey man, wish you the best. Hope it goes well,’” he said. “You have to be empathetic. And that’s hard because as you build your team, you’re so focused on that.”

Silverfield said in the past he’d found himself arguing with players about aspects of their transfer that had nothing to do with Memphis. Now, he’s careful to sell what awaits them in Memphis rather than pointing out the flaws of where a player might be considering going.

“You can’t take anything personal,” Silverfield said. “But you do.”

Educating players and having hard conversations

In the early years of immediate eligibility for transfers, coaches might have believed a decision to leave wasn’t right for a player.

Now, they do research and try to present data to players.

“I tell them up front I’m going to skew this my way because I want you to stay. But there is some reality here,” Keeler said. “But I can explain to players they might take a bigger check now and give up a bigger check later by putting themselves in bad situations. You try to educate them but you try not to be negative or belittle. You just want to have an honest conversation.”

A player might come to Keeler saying he’d been offered $150,000 to play for a Big Ten or SEC program. Now, as the market for players has settled and rates are relatively consistent, he said he knows what a number signifies for the programs at the top of those leagues.

“He might think that’s big money,” Keeler said. “To them, that’s backup money. If you have that relationship, you can have honest conversations.”

If a player tells him he’s going to a particular program, he’ll dig up their roster and see what he thinks.

“They might have three corners coming back that have played a ton of snaps. Two starters and a rotation guy. You know they’re bringing in your starter to be a fourth corner. You have to show them that,” Keeler said. “Or point out, ‘Hey, they graduated one offensive lineman and already signed five from the portal. They’re getting to you late because they found room for a sixth. You weren’t the first one they signed.’

“You have to do your research and have honest conversations. It goes further if you have that relationship and they know you’re gonna shoot them straight.”

Silverfield said each player’s situation is different. But if a player only has one year left and has thrived at Memphis, he’ll point out that one year at a bigger program introduces some variables on the road to the NFL, even amid the tantalizing offer of a bigger stage or bigger immediate payday.

“If you’re a freshman All-American and somebody comes and gives you an obvious opportunity to start or maybe you just don’t like me, then that’s fine. Move on,” Silverfield said. “I want to make sure they’re making the best decisions for themselves. I can tell them about the pitfalls that might come with a move. But ultimately I just want to make the case for why they’ll have success staying with us.”

South Florida coach Alex Golesh said he’s talked with his team four times in the last three months about being guarded about who they’re getting advice from.

“I can point to guys now where it’s like, ‘Look at this situation, look at that situation,’” Golesh said. “We’ve got guys on our team who were at a place, left and then were like, ‘Holy smokes, what did I do?’”

There are also times when a coach can tip his cap and thank a player, as Silverfield said. Sumrall pointed to former Tulane cornerback Rayshawn Pleasant, who played 37 snaps in 2023, blossomed into a star in 2024 and moved to Auburn this offseason with two years of eligibility left.

Said Sumrall: “He went from being an unknown nobody to a well-compensated SEC player.”

Tulane lost multiple key players to power-conference schools, including QB Darian Mensah (above, Duke) and CB Rayshawn Pleasant (Auburn). (Tommy Gilligan / Imagn Images)

Being proactive

Keeler mostly knows what every player on his Temple roster makes, but like many coaches, he isn’t the person who handles the finances.

Early in the 2023 season at Sam Houston, Keeler’s general manager, Clayton Barnes, came to him with a request: They needed to bump up 6-foot-4, 255-pound edge rusher Chris Murray’s pay. He wasn’t a star yet, but they’d seen him thrive in practice. And Murray forecasted a shortage of edge rushers in the upcoming portal window and knew Murray’s measurables might earn him calls from bigger programs.

Murray wasn’t thinking about leaving. He was taken aback at the offer and said the program didn’t need to give him more money.

“I said I want to because we saw what the future looked like,” Keeler said. “He felt it was great when we came to him first.”

He stayed at Sam Houston for 2024 and made 11 1/2 tackles for loss and 5 1/2 sacks, earning first-team All-Conference USA honors. After Keeler left for Temple, Murray took an offer to move up to Auburn, but last season may not have happened without the Bearkats’ proactive approach.

“We’re going to attack our locker room first. The teams that have the most coming back generally have the most chance to sustain success,” Keeler said. “Being a head coach now is about managing the stuff that can be the difference between a player staying or leaving.”

Added Golesh: “Are your resources allocated into retaining talent or acquiring talent? Everybody will tell you they want to do both but there has to be a focus. For us, we’ve had a huge focus on retention because that’s the name of the game.”

It doesn’t always work. Sumrall turned to Mensah last fall as Tulane’s starting quarterback after he began camp as the team’s third quarterback, paid almost nothing by Tulane’s collective.

“We tried to shift that quickly as we moved him into being the starter,” Sumrall said, adding that his program uses an NFL model of percentages in deciding how to spend on their roster relative to total budget, with an extra emphasis on offensive and defensive lines. “Maybe it was too little too late or not enough period. Even if we tried to go to our max, we probably weren’t able to get to where it went.”

Being strategic in recruiting

As the sport has changed, at least one truth has remained for coaches: You recruit your problems.

Now, those problems just look a little different for Group of Five coaches. When it’s easier than ever for players to transfer, regional recruiting has become more important.

Keeler said when his staff took over at Temple, they drew lines from Connecticut to Virginia and Ohio. Recruiting outside that region will be a rarity.

Staying in a geographic footprint removes one reason players leave: Getting closer to family back home.

And coaches have re-emphasized a healthy locker room and recruiting character in hopes of having a roster with players who aren’t just looking for a ticket up the college football ladder.

Every now and then, Sumrall’s assistants have to pull him aside in a meeting with recruits.

“Coach, are you trying to de-recruit this guy?” he says they’ll ask.

“I want to be so transparent and honest so they know what they’re signing up for,” Sumrall said. This is how we operate. If you don’t want to operate like this, that’s cool. Don’t come here. I will tell kids that in my office.”

Other coaches noted they’re diligent about flagging potential concerns in the recruitment process, be it an aggressive or unprofessional agent or a problem parent.

“The ultimate frustration is there are so many outside influences now that are so far out of your control,” Golesh said.

Vetting players in the portal is difficult because the process moves faster, but if the program recruited a player in high school because he’s regional, it can help with intel. Golesh is recruiting in the talent hotbed of South Florida. When players don’t have success at higher levels, it can mean bringing in high-rated prospects to USF looking for a fresh start.

Painting a clear picture and making that picture reality once a player signs can prevent players from developing wandering eyes, Golesh said.

“If there’s transparency on the front end, there’s less craziness on the back end,” Golesh said. “Don’t ever promise somebody something you’re not sure you can deliver on. That’s when you start to have problems.”

Silverfield pointed to his team’s GPA last year being the highest in history and one of the country’s leaders in community service hours as a testament to the types of players he brought in and helping the program not be a revolving door.

At the start of the year, he has players write down goals for the year and hang them in their lockers.

“I’m gonna hold their ass accountable to those goals,” he said. “I think guys appreciate that.”

Jeff Traylor and UTSA got a boost when starting QB Owen McCown elected to return this season. (Danny Wild / Imagn Images)

Building up their own war chests

Every other week, Traylor meets with UTSA athletic director Lisa Campos and the program’s key fundraisers about one key topic: How can we meet or fundraising goals while also growing our budget?

“We don’t have the ability to pay max, but we want to be competitive in this league,” Traylor said. “That’s where we have to start.”

This offseason, it worked. Quarterback Owen McCown elected to stay after throwing for 3,424 yards and 25 touchdowns last season. The offense lost running back Brandon High Jr, the team’s second-leading rusher, to Cal, but every other major contributor on offense elected to stay.

“They stayed because of Owen,” Traylor said.

When Golesh was considering leaving his post as Tennessee’s offensive coordinator for South Florida, the most critical question he wanted answered was USF’s ability to recruit and retain talent. It had geographical advantages. Knowing it had financial advantages relative to the level helped convince him to take the job.

Immediate eligibility for transfers lowered the barriers for players to leave their program. As a result, it made sustaining success at the sport’s lower levels harder than ever.

But the coaches tasked with doing it are still trying to develop tools to build sustainable programs amid constant change.

“If it’s just about the bag, our bag isn’t gonna be big enough,” Traylor said. “But if it’s about development, the fit, the holistic opportunity, we can compete.”

(Top photos of Jon Sumrall and K.C. Keeler: Julio Aguilar, Chris Gardner / Getty Images)