The transfer portal was fast and furious, but it ‘all worked out’ for this Clemson QB

Hunter Helms knew life in the transfer portal moved fast.

He never would have guessed how fast.

A former backup quarterback for Clemson, Helms got an immediate reality check on Nov. 28, 2023, when he didn’t even make it back to his car after a meeting with the team compliance staff before media outlets were breaking the news that he’d officially entered the portal.

Said Helms: “I was like, ‘Huh?’ That was insane.”

Over the next 39 days, he and his family embarked on the football recruiting equivalent of speed dating. Instead of having months — even years — to determine his college choice like he did as a Columbia-area high school star, Helms had weeks. Instead of taking dozens of college visits, he took three. All with the understanding that schools’ recruiting plans could change at the drop of a hat.

The quarterback was one of nine Clemson scholarship players to enter the portal this cycle and one of thousands nationally. (The NCAA said 2,918 FBS football players entered the portal in 2022, the latest figure available and a number sure to increase for the 2023 cycle.)

For Helms, someone who prefers to stay out of the spotlight and make deliberate choices over rash decisions, taking calls from 20 to 22 new schools and making a decision on his football future off what boiled down to a month of interactions was “strange and weird.”

“I’m not really a big fan of the portal,” he said. “It was just the right situation and the right timing for me to go into it. But it all worked out in the end.”

Helms announced Jan. 5 he’d committed to Rhode Island, an FCS school competing in the Coastal Athletic Association.

Kingston, Rhode Island is a long way from his hometown of West Columbia. But after serving as a backup to multiple five-star quarterback recruits at Clemson, Helms couldn’t be more fired up about the chance to become the guy at URI and lead its fast-paced offense in 2024.

Heading into Helms’ first season at Rhode Island, The State spoke with the former Tigers quarterback, his father and his lead recruiter with the Rams for an inside look at the transfer portal recruiting process at the game’s most important position.

The consensus? The quicker, the better.

“There’s not a lot of time to waste,” Hunter’s father Todd Helms said.

Parting advice from Dabo Swinney

Helms’ transfer process started with a meeting — a big one.

Even though he knew he’d given his all to the program for four seasons, and even though he graduated last spring, sitting down with Clemson coach Dabo Swinney and telling him in an exit meeting he planned to transfer was still “nerve-wracking,” Helms said.

The sit-down, three days after Clemson beat South Carolina on the road in its regular-season finale, couldn’t have gone smoother. Helms said Swinney supported his decision and told him he’d done things “the right way” by earning his degree first.

But the coach had one piece of advice.

“Don’t go somewhere else to be No. 2.”

Helms, after all, had been occupying the role of “above average backup quarterback” at Clemson ever since he signed with his dream school as a preferred walk-on in 2020 and wound up backing up three different five-star quarterback recruits.

In his first fall on campus, he became the only Clemson quarterback since 1954 to throw two touchdown passes in a game as a walk-on. He earned a scholarship in 2021. He was the No. 2 quarterback on Clemson’s depth chart behind starter Cade Klubnik the entire 2023 season.

“I guarantee you he’s one of the best backups in the country,” Swinney once said.

Todd Helms said “a lot of people” thought Hunter would hit the portal after the 2022 season because he was set to graduate that spring and it was clear Klubnik (who was fresh off an ACC championship game MVP performance) was Clemson’s quarterback of the future.

Hunter Helms agreed, noting that Swinney’s decision to fire former offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach Brandon Streeter and replace him with TCU’s Garrett Riley was a key factor in him sticking around for a fourth season. He was intrigued by the chance of a fresh start.

Although his efforts didn’t result in a starting role or any non-garbage time snaps in relief of Klubnik, who was never benched or knocked out of a game with injury, Helms still took a huge physical jump in spring 2023 — he’s now operating at around 9% body fat — and had what he calls “my favorite year being at Clemson” under Riley’s tutelage last fall as a redshirt junior.

“It all worked out,” he said.

But now, after operating behind Trevor Lawrence and DJ Uiagalelei and Klubnik from 2020-23, it was time to move on. After meeting with Swinney, Helms told Riley in person about his decision, informed a few other coaches and teammates milling around the facility and met with Henry Archuleta, the team’s compliance officer.

The process was like clockwork — which makes sense, given the national scale of the transfer portal, an online database the NCAA first established in 2018 to simplify the process for athletes.

The portal became even more popular (and unavoidable, whether you’re trying to add players or retain players) when the NCAA ruled in 2021 that all athletes had a one-time waiver to transfer and be immediately eligible at their next school, as opposed to sitting out a year as previously required for non-graduates.

Helms signed a few forms, Archuleta submitted his name and minutes later he had a confirmation email: “You’re in the portal.” Given all the thought and effort Helms had put into his transfer decision, he got a kick out of those final steps.

“It was anticlimactic,” he said.

If only that held true for the rest of the process.

‘Picked right up’

When the world needed him most, Patrick Murphy was at the dentist.

Back in 2019, Murphy was working as the offensive coordinator at Holy Cross and nailed his evaluation on Helms, then a rising senior quarterback recruit at Gray Collegiate Academy.

He stumbled across Helms’ film, loved what he saw, flew down to Columbia to meet him, got him on campus for a visit, offered him a scholarship and earned his verbal commitment that summer … only for Clemson, coming off its second national championship in three seasons, to swoop in that fall and eventually flip Helms from the FCS school outside Boston.

Four years later, Helms was in the transfer portal with two years of eligibility remaining — a golden opportunity for Murphy, who now works as the offensive coordinator at Rhode Island and had just lost his starting quarterback of three years, Kasim Hill, to graduation.

Once Helms entered his name in the portal, Murphy said his phone was “going crazy” with URI co-workers making sure he saw the news. The only issue: He was stuck in a dentist appointment.

“Thankfully just a cleaning,” he said with a laugh.

After 20 more minutes in the chair, Murphy popped up and got to work. He was still among the first people to get Helms on the phone — the quarterback said it “wasn’t an hour” after he transferred that coaches started calling him — and the conversation, by all accounts, was a great one. Which was significant, considered they hadn’t spoken to each other in four years.

“We just picked right up,” Murphy said.

“I was like, ‘Feels like I’m 18 again,’ ” Helms added.

To both parties, it spoke to the importance of not burning bridges. Murphy has been working in college football for 28 years and said he has “never understood” why some coaches choose to blast recruits who decommit or transfer elsewhere, especially in this transfer portal era.

Even as a high school senior, Helms handled his decommitment from Holy Cross like a pro, Murphy said. Murphy and Todd Helms — who works in education and helped start a number of charter schools in South Carolina, including Gray Collegiate — also became buddies during Hunter’s high school recruiting process and stayed in touch over the years, texting periodically.

“I was a former PWO (preferred walk-on) myself,” Murphy said, “so I’m always rooting for the underdog.”

His prior connection with the Helms family was crucial: It helped Rhode Island differentiate itself in a large field of suitors. During his first week or so in the portal, Hunter Helms said he heard from 20 to 22 different schools through either text, call or social media direct message.

It was a mixed bag of suitors. Elon, an FCS school in central North Carolina, had recruited Helms out of high school and was quick to the punch. Same for App State. Florida Atlantic, which played a game at Clemson last fall, called him.

Tulsa, Ohio and Buffalo “came on strong.” Helms also drew some Power Five interest from Boston College and Iowa State, calls that came out of left field.

What about South Carolina, which may have been his biggest rival in college but was very public in its pursuit of a transfer quarterback this cycle?

Helms, a Columbia native, laughed.

“Go Tigers,” he said. “Yeah, a few of their coaches followed me on Twitter. But nothing other than that.”

New life up north

After an initial flurry of activity, Helms said he zeroed in on six or seven schools that he felt were “actually serious” in their pursuit. Time was of the essence — even though Helms could enter the portal a bit earlier as a graduate, he was still beholden to the NCAA recruiting calendar.

As of two years ago, there are only two windows for college football players to formally enter the transfer portal — the fall window is 30 days long, starting the day after conference championship weekend, and ran Dec. 4, 2023 to Jan. 2, 2024.

But that window also overlaps with a nearly four-week dead period (no visits allowed) from mid-December to mid-January, covering bowl prep, bowl season and holiday break.

Helms and his father quickly realized those two timelines didn’t match up too well and if he didn’t want to wait for a specially created Jan. 3-7 transfer visit period, he needed to knock out his trips in from Dec. 1-17, a little over two weeks. (They both think the NCAA should start the portal window in January after the conclusion of bowl season, as opposed to the regular season, to better accommodate transfers.)

“To me, it was like the biggest mad rush ever,” Hunter Helms said.

He centered his decision around one big question: At his next school, would he have a legitimate shot at winning the starting quarterback job in the spring?

Helms never asked for a guaranteed starting job, but programs who wanted quarterback depth or already had established starters quickly fell to the wayside.

“All he was looking for was a legit opportunity,” Todd, his father, said.

Helms initially hoped to make six visits but ended up having time for three: Elon, App State and Rhode Island (since it was an official visit, the program covered his flight).

He actually got pretty far down the line with App State — the scrappy, Boone-based program that’s known for giving Power Five programs a run for their money — and had a “first-class visit” there. App State’s coaches made sure to mention how another former Clemson quarterback, Chase Brice, had a career year in the mountains of North Carolina back in 2022.

But the Mountaineers finished as Helms’ runner-up, mostly because of the presence of Joey Aguilar, a returning starter at quarterback who set school records in 2023.

On its face, Rhode Island’s roster offered a far more open quarterback competition with the graduation of Hill, who was one of the top passers in the FCS in 2023.

And the more Helms learned about Rhode Island (6-5 and 4-4 in the CAA last year), the more he liked. Murphy runs a no-huddle offense that once ran 119 plays from scrimmage in a game. The Rams returned a wide receiver who was first-team all-conference as a freshman. Campus was beautiful — it’s a 90-minute train ride from Boston — and URI offered a strong business school in the New England area, a hub for activity.

For Helms, who graduated from Clemson with a bachelor’s degree in construction science and management and is now pursuing his MBA, that was the “cherry on top.” Rhode Island even set up a meeting between Helms and Mark Cruise, a former URI linebacker who played in the NFL and now leads a wealth management firm in nearby Providence, on the former’s official visit.

Although Murphy joked that Helms made him, head coach Jim Fleming and the rest of the staff “sweat” a little bit by sitting on his decision for a few weeks after his mid-December trip, their efforts paid off. Helms verbally committed and signed with Rhode Island in early January.

“I think all of those things appealed to Hunter when he was looking around,” Murphy said. “Come in, have an opportunity to battle for the starting job. Nothing’s given here — he’s gonna have to earn it — but everything’s worked out this time.”

That’s all Helms wanted in his recruiting process: an opportunity. He wasn’t too hung up on the perception of “dropping down a level” from the FBS to the FCS and saw his four seasons on the bench for the Tigers as a formative part of his football journey, which now has new life at Rhode Island with an old friend in Murphy.

He may not have loved the speed and the stress of the transfer portal, but he loved its end result. Now, after a fast search, he’s got clear goals as he heads north.

“Embrace everything,” Helms said. “I’m coming from the best, if not one of the best, college football facilities and programs in the country. It’s a big change, but ball’s ball at the end of the day. That’s what I’m excited about, to get out there and start slinging the rock again. Everything else is just kind of a bonus.”