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Wide receiver Dae’Quan Wright over portal
College football has spent the past few years destroying basically every traditional boundary it once had, but this is a pretty impressive new one. Dae’Quan Wright is currently employed by the Cleveland Browns and is also officially available in the college football transfer portal.
Wright entered the portal Thursday, becoming the first active NFL player ever to formally do so. College coaches can now recruit a player who is literally sitting on an NFL roster, which feels like the transfer portal finally completing its evolution from roster-building tool into a completely lawless frontier.
Dae’Quan Wright Has An NFL Job And College Eligibility
Wright’s situation exists because of a temporary restraining order issued Wednesday by a Louisiana judge.
The ruling applies to a limited group of players challenging the NCAA’s eligibility rules and, crucially, prevents the NCAA from enforcing rules that would otherwise keep players who signed professional contracts from returning to college. Wright is one of the players covered by the order, along with some other current NFL players.
That produced a sentence college football probably did not expect to see in 2026: an NFL tight end entered the transfer portal, a move confirmed by Matt Zenitz of CBS Sports.
Wright went undrafted in April after playing at Virginia Tech and Ole Miss, where he finished his college career with 113 catches for 1,603 yards. He originally signed with Philadelphia before Cleveland claimed him off waivers on Aug. 11.
So this is not a retired player digging his shoulder pads out of the garage after five years.
Wright is a rookie currently trying to make an NFL team.
The Browns have him on their roster while preparing for Saturday’s preseason game against Buffalo, and the NFL’s final cutdown to 53 players arrives Aug. 30. If Wright does not make it, college football suddenly exists as a legitimate fallback option instead of the usual practice-squad-or-find-another-job decision.
NFL Roster Cuts Could Get Extremely Weird
The ruling is temporary and narrow, so we are not quite at the point where Aaron Rodgers can decide he misses Saturdays and enrolls at Wisconsin.
Still, the precedent is chaotic enough.
College personnel departments are already examining whether more players could follow Wright’s path. One Big 12 general manager told CBS Sports that his program hoped the market would become saturated because it needed another player or two.
That is incredible.
NFL roster cutdown day has traditionally involved teams releasing hundreds of players who then scramble for practice-squad jobs, waiver claims, or opportunities elsewhere in professional football. Now at least some fringe NFL players could potentially respond to getting cut by checking which college has the best NIL package.
And the money makes the decision considerably less ridiculous than it would have sounded a decade ago.
A player choosing between an NFL practice-squad opportunity and a significant NIL or revenue-sharing deal at a major college program may have an actual financial decision to make, especially if returning to school gives him another season to improve his draft stock.
Wright might ultimately stay in Cleveland. The court order could also change before any of this gets much further, with an injunction hearing still ahead.
But the portal entry itself already happened.
College football officially has its first player who can receive recruiting calls from SEC coaches and an NFL paycheck at the same time.
We might need a new definition of “going pro.”