The parents of Cal star quarterback Jaron-Keawe Sagapolutele were the first line of defense for keeping the rising sophomore in Berkeley.

In college football’s brave new world of the transfer portal, it’s no surprise that someone with the hype that followed the 19-year-old Golden Bear was a huge target for programs across the country. In a recent story the Athletic published about Cal’s efforts to keep Sagapolutele, the young quarterback shared that, while he never once considered entering the transfer portal, he knew about the interest.

“My parents were telling me there were schools that were calling,” Sagapolutele told reporter Antonio Morales. “They wouldn’t tell me what schools, so I wouldn’t know which schools specifically.”

The modern-day use of the portal system has been quite controversial because of just how much freedom of movement college players have. Now that players are no longer required to sit out a season after transferring, they can jump from school to school as long as there’s demand for their services — the way coaches have always been able to. 

What adds another layer of controversy to how things are set up is the prevalence of tampering. Schools will reach out to players before they even enter the transfer portal, which is what happened with Sagapolutele. The practice is illegal, but it’s commonplace enough that most programs seem to have a mutually assured destruction policy with one another over it, as one anonymous ACC general manager told ESPN in a March story. (And funny enough, it is ex-Cal linebacker Luke Ferrelli who is in the middle of the biggest public tampering scandal in the sport right now.)

“We’re doing it ourselves, too,” the anonymous GM said. “If we’re doing it, we’re not going to turn other people in for it.”

Sagapolutele said he didn’t know which schools called for him, but given how much top-level quarterbacks can demand — a different Athletic story estimated the top-of-the-market quarterbacks were getting offers of $4 million and up — it seems likely the calls came from Power 4 schools. That seemed to be confirmed in a report from the Sporting News published last Thursday where an anonymous Cal official told reporter Sam Profeta, “There were numerous teams that came in and hit his representation up, hit his family up. Teams from all over the SEC, ACC, Big Ten. There were teams everywhere trying to get in on him.”

Sagapolutele decided to return to Cal for at least the 2026 season, even after general manager Ron Rivera replaced Justin Wilcox with Tosh Lupoi at head coach. The Golden Bears have their star back for one more year, but given how things went this offseason, and how Sagapolutele is expected to improve this fall, there’s a good chance his family will be going through this transfer recruitment process all over again.