Commentary: Don’t fear the transfer portal. Follow the case of Cam Ward and embrace it as a meritocracy.

Not too long ago, Cam Ward was a high school quarterback nobody noticed outside West Columbia, Tex., a town southwest of Houston but much closer to the Gulf. Ward was invisible to Football Bowl Subdivision recruiters playing at Columbia High. Now, even while accounting for the standard degree of overreaction to the first week of a college football season, he is on an inside track to the Heisman Trophy ceremony, thanks to the woefully overdue advent of player agency in college sports and a talent ascending in kind.

Ward’s high school ran a classic Wing-T scheme, in which three and sometimes as many as five running backs line up at the same time on a given play. You don’t need a stitch of schematic acumen to glean that Ward’s invisibility had nothing to do with his talent and everything to do with his circumstances. He totaled just 109 pass attempts his entire senior season.

Columbia runs the Wing-T because it works for Columbia, which is all the reason a program needs. But Texas high school football is now more than a generation into the pass-heavy Air Raid, making the Roughnecks’ playbook anathema. Florida’s D.J. Lagway, a fellow Texan and the top overall quarterback in the 2024 signing class, charted 393 attempts in his senior season. Texas A&M quarterback Conner Weigman had 306 his last year of high school.

Ward’s first and only scholarship offer came from a start-up FCS program: University of the Incarnate Word. The Catholic school based in San Antonio launched a football program in 2009 and moved up to the FCS in 2013.

Like most of Texas, the mighty Cardinals aren’t allergic to the passing game, and even though his high school favored the run, it turned out Ward could still actually pass. During a pandemic-shortened and delayed freshman season in the spring of 2021, Ward threw for 2,260 yards and 24 touchdowns en route to the Jerry Rice Award as the most outstanding freshman in the FCS.

After Ward had an equally explosive sophomore season, his head coach, Eric Morris, left to become offensive coordinator at Washington State. Thanks to college football’s transfer portal allowing players to freely change schools without punishment or delay, Ward followed his head coach to Pullman, finally landing in the FBS.

Ward was classified as a sophomore because of NCAA eligibility waivers for the 2020 season, and he threw for more than 3,000 yards each season in 2022 and 2023. But Morris departed again, this time to become the head coach at North Texas in 2023, Washington State was exiled out of power conference affiliation in the latest round of TV-driven conference realignment, and Ward received that rarest of opportunities in college athletics: a choice.

Washington State might have qualified as the FBS benchmark Ward hoped to attain, but just like the coach he rode into town with, he thought better options existed. So he left again, this time as one of the most sought-after quarterbacks in the transfer portal, and he landed at Miami, a College Football Playoff contender boasting more talent than any of Ward’s previous stops.

The result, in a single-game sample size, was an assault on Florida on Saturday afternoon: Ward finished 26 for 35 for 385 yards, three touchdowns and one interception as the Miami offense scored 41 points in The Swamp.

If Ward were to wind up in New York at season’s end, or even win the Heisman, he would be far from the first transfer player to do so. Army’s Felix “Doc” Blanchard was the first in 1945, and five of the past seven winners, including last year’s recipient, Jayden Daniels, started their collegiate careers somewhere else.

But if Ward maintains even a semblance of a notable senior campaign at Miami – and more importantly parlays that work into an NFL payday – he’ll define the kind of bootstraps folk tale about American meritocracy coaches love to tell … about themselves: Nothing was handed to him. He achieved his way out of obscurity. He adapted to his environment and worked hard to make everyone else around him better.

Traditionalists will be upset that he will end up wearing three different helmets during his college career, and the ever-thinning veneer of an in-classroom education as the primary objective of college football feels flimsier than ever in a story such as Ward’s. But in the wake of various sea changes in NCAA policy, that fact thankfully doesn’t portend the kind of institutional retribution it used to.

In Ward’s ascension we see the same kind of hero-arc narratives we’ve willingly consumed from the sport’s managerial class now apply to the labor. That nascent Incarnate Word program that sent Morris to the FBS after four seasons? Its replacement head coach, G.J. Kinne, parlayed one season there into his current job at FBS Texas State. This level of striving has long been publicly accepted in coaches. Will the winding paths of players such as Ward be received the same way?

It would feel like a particularly insane double standard if stories such as Ward’s aren’t accepted as both logical and laudable in the near future, when coaches themselves are now celebrated - or denigrated - for how they use the transfer portal. Last season, Mike Norvell’s addition of transfer pieces such as wide receiver Keon Coleman helped push Florida State from a very good team to an undefeated one. Meanwhile, Dabo Swinney’s decision to make Clemson the only non-service-academy FBS program to abstain from portal additions this offseason looks fatally antiquated after a 34-3 blowout loss to Georgia on Saturday.

It would seem wildly illogical to fete the strategic acumen of a coach cherry-picking transfer players and still “kids-these-days” humbug about modern players’ lack of commitment in the same thought, but that’s what happens when the character mythmaking of a sport has been largely reserved for its managerial class over the past 100-odd years.

If Ward is on that stage in New York this December, it should be viewed as a big neon sign of a net positive for the new iteration of college football. He and his family didn’t move Zip codes to change high school football programs; instead, he did the noblest thing possible per the rules of American Hard Work: He played out a bad hand, took the sole, smallest opportunity presented, and maximized it repeatedly. Ward’s success in quickly vaulting up the rungs of his industry reflects the kind of American fairy tale the ruling class has delivered to generations of young people as a template without instruction.

Ward’s will be a good and important story even if there’s no trophy or title at the end of it. Freed of arbitrary restrictions to preserve the decaying scam of “student-athlete” profiteering, he made something of himself, no matter how many helmets it took.