Ethan Vasko will achieve a third — or maybe even a fourth — level of familiarity to football fans in Hampton Roads on Saturday.
Vasko, a well-traveled redshirt junior, will likely start behind center for Liberty when the Flames take on Old Dominion at S.B. Ballard Stadium.
If Vasko’s name rings a bell, it might be difficult for some to figure out exactly which one it rings.
In 2023, Vasko led Coastal Carolina to a 28-24 comeback win over the Monarchs. Before that, he was an all-everything quarterback at Chesapeake’s Oscar Smith High, where he won a pair of state titles and was named the Abe Goldblatt All-Tidewater Football Player of the Year.
In between, Vasko spent his freshman year at Kansas, choosing the Jayhawks over ODU late in the recruiting cycle.
Few on the Monarchs’ sideline, though, will think twice about seeing Vasko in a different uniform on their home field.
Even on his third school in four years, Vasko is far from being college football’s lone nomad.
Relaxed NCAA transfer rules, along with the relatively new lure of name, image and likeness dollars, have turned the sport’s rosters into football versions of U.S. News & World Report.
Hard by the names of an increasing number of players is not just their height, weight and position, but for which college — or colleges — they’ve already played.
Vasko’s serpentine path to Lynchburg is becoming the rule rather than the exception.
“I think every week, we see somebody like that,” sixth-year coach Ricky Rahne said. “And then every week when I’m going through the (opponent’s) depth chart, there are very few kids that this is their first school. I mean, very few. And that’s not Liberty; that’s everybody in the country.”
Rahne is not wrong. According to a report published in August by The Athletic, 60.3% of 247Sports’ 600 top prospects by position in the high school class of 2021 — the first players to enter college with the chance to change schools and play right away — had transferred at least once. About a third (33.4%) of those had transferred multiple times.
In other words, a coveted player beginning college just three years ago is more likely than not to have transferred at least once by now.
Quarterback Ethan Vasko holds the MVP trophy after helping Coastal Carolina defeat San Jose State 24-14 at the Hawaii Bowl on Saturday night in Honolulu. MARCO GARCIA/AP
Some coaches in multiple sports have likened the transfer portal to The Wild West, a player-grabbing free-for-all that favors the highest bidders. Fans decry it for, among other things, its lack of program continuity and its dilution of amateurism.
For players like Vasko, who had offers from around the nation coming out of Oscar Smith despite a COVID-truncated junior season, the portal has offered a chance to find just the right fit after multiple tries.
“I think it kind of gives players the same kind of access as coaches,” Vasko said. “If a coach gets a job offer that’s better, they’re going to leave. So I think it gives players that kind of same feeling. And also, if a coach just doesn’t really like a player and it’s not turning out the way that they believe, it’s easy for that player to leave and go find a spot that maybe coaches believe in them and stuff like that. So I think it is good in that sense.”
Forty-three players on Liberty’s roster began their college careers elsewhere. Besides Vasko, five others have played at two other schools.
ODU has 42 transfers, including three from schools (Virginia Tech, James Madison and Georgia State) on the Monarchs’ 2025 schedule.
It’s no wonder that players have become accustomed to constant movement between programs.
“That’s college football in 2025,” ODU safety Mario Easterly said. “That’s what it is. You’re going to have people leave. You’re going to have people come in each year.”
Coaches, as Vasko pointed out, are no different. Twenty-nine Football Bowl Subdivision programs opened the season with new men in charge.
Virginia Tech’s Brent Pry, who was fired after losing 45-26 to ODU at home two weeks ago, is arguably a victim of the portal era.
Pry was let go after an 0-3 start to his fourth season, which would’ve, in many cases, fallen into an unwritten recruiting grace period for coaches just a decade ago.
Like transient players, coaches are now expected to perform almost immediately.
Rahne, who coached against Coastal and Vasko in that 2023 heartbreaker, said seeing past opponents resurface elsewhere has become “pretty normal.”
“That’s just the way it is now,” Rahne said. “You’re probably going to see these guys in different spots.
“It’s a little bit like the coaching profession: You never know when you’re going to see these coaches again. That’s been like that for a while. But now, it’s with the players as well.”
Redshirt junior Maarten Woudsma from Oscar Smith started seven games at guard last season. (ODU Athletics photo)
Monarchs offensive guard Maarten Woudsma is among the increasingly rare players who have spent their entire careers at one school.
Woudsma, a junior, snapped the ball to Vasko at Oscar Smith on two state championship teams.
By Sunday, Woudsma will have played with Vasko in high school and against him on two college teams.
If football is a small world, then Woudsma and Vasko have occupied some of the same islands.
“I don’t think a lot of people have experienced that across the nation,” Woudsma said.
“Even for him and me both being able to go DI, it’s a blessing.”
Some of the transfer rules are being tightened. Just last week, the NCAA Administrative Council adopted a proposal to eliminate the 30-day spring transfer window, meaning that most migrations will be reduced to an annual occurrence in January.
Vasko, who has passed for more than 3,600 yards through 25 career games, didn’t set out to become a hired gun when he left Chesapeake. NIL money, he said, was not a factor in his decision to leave Coastal for Liberty.
Still, he has plenty of company at a position that has proven to be necessarily mobile in more ways than one.
The Athletic, the sports arm of The New York Times, reported that among the top 50 quarterback prospects from the class of ’21, 42 had transferred at least once.
Vasko hopes twice is enough.
“My plan is to just stick it out here and play here,” he said.
“Everything just kind of came with how just everything’s went. Ending up at Liberty’s awesome, kind of being in the state where I played high school at. That’s all really cool. I like the way that turned out, for sure.”
David Hall, david.hall@pilotonline.com.
