Unless he drops to FCS, he will have to sit out a year unless he gets a waiver from the NCAA. I can understand his position since by playing time he was 4th on the list. For someone so highly recruited, it has to be very frustrating.
The coaching change from Collins to Key is a free transfer for any of our players, including Taisun. He won’t have to sit out a year.
He looked to be behind Pyron and Gibson on the depth chart. As far as I could see, he moved well and his Achille’s tendon didn’t seem like a problem. I don’t know what we’d do with him next year, but this past season it looked like we used Taisun as a wildcat QB.
I’ve seen a few assumptions made on why players are transferring, or for some of the churn in our HS recruits. With the portal, a small number of players entering the portal are probably known commodities moving up, but we could say that’s somewhere in the range of 5-15%. Examples would include the players that we lost last year that went on to start at Bama, Arkansas, and Ole Miss (Gibbs, Domineck, and Ivey). Most of our transfers transferred “down”. Maybe you get to 40-50% of the portal if you add in players who mostly go in of their own initiative who are looking for other places. Then the rest are players who are strongly encouraged by their teams to look elsewhere to play.
I don’t think Taisun is in the same category with Gibbs, Ivey, and Domineck. Last year, our transfers out had some trade up to higher ranked teams, some moved pretty much laterally, most moved “down”, and a lot didn’t find FBS homes.