UHND.com - Notre Dame Football, Basketball, & Recruiting

Short answer: the portal isn’t an eligibility requirement — it’s a *process* that only applies if you remain enrolled and transfer as a student-athlete.

What he did instead was unenroll from Purdue at the end of the term. Once you’re not enrolled anywhere, you’re no longer a “transfer” under NCAA rules. You’re just a former student applying to a new school. If Notre Dame admits him, enrolls him full-time, and he meets baseline NCAA eligibility (credits, progress toward degree, seasons left), he’s immediately eligible. The portal never comes into play.

Why doesn’t everyone do this?
Because it’s risky. If you unenroll and the new school doesn’t admit you, doesn’t take your credits, or doesn’t line up aid, you can lose a semester or worse. Most players can’t afford that cliff. In this case (Purdue → Notre Dame, kicker), the academic risk is unusually low and the fallback options are plentiful.

Why not just use the portal + “do not contact”?
For high-profile/NIL players, the portal is actually protective. For a low-profile specialist, unenrolling avoids portal windows, paperwork, and transfer-specific rules entirely. It’s not about hiding him from other teams — it’s about not being a transfer at all.

One additional wrinkle: because he didn’t transfer *as a student-athlete*, he didn’t burn the one-time transfer exception. If he ever uses the portal later, that would still count as his first portal transfer — a modest but real procedural advantage compared to players who already used the portal.

This existed before the portal era too (same basic idea as old grad transfers): eligibility follows enrollment status, not the portal. The portal just manages *how* transfers happen; it doesn’t create eligibility.