Thanks for the great Qs and thoughts,
@Dillon77! As you well know, Stanford and ND are chief cross-recruiting competition for one another, so always interesting to hear how the sausage gets made in South Bend.
Re: your question and other questions about transfers, Stanford accepts around ~2100 high school senior applicants to fill ~1700 frosh places. Transfer applications are due March 15, and frosh admits must commit by May 1. Stanford then has a sense of its yield, and if/how many spots are open to transfers. Stanford generally does not strive to leave more than a few dozen open seats for transfers. One year, their yield was much higher than expected, and I think they admitted like 10 transfers total. They then continue to fill off the transfer waitlist as a handful of current students file papers to withdraw over the course of the summer. But again, this is a tiny number. For example, for the fall of 2021, there were
3,265 transfer applicants and 55 individuals were accepted.
As to who they admit as transfers, they try to prioritize community college students, non-traditional transfers (think people who had kids young and then returned to higher ed, folks who retired from being professional ballerinas/classical musicians), and military folks. In other words: people who could not have/would not have applied to Stanford out of high school, but who will bring a different set of life experiences. Needless to say, those applicants aren't going to be student-athletes at other top BB programs. Stanford also takes a handful of transfers from comparable HYP type schools, though a very small number. (And I misspoke earlier: we do admit junior year transfers, but they tend to be 1/3 of the total transfer class.)
Given these dynamics, it shouldn't be surprising that the transfer portal doesn't work very well for us - they either have to seek to transfer before the BB season is over (by March 15) or else seek an exceptional application entry through the athletic department, they don't fit the criteria for typical transfer students, and they need basically 4.0 grades from a competitive college. The only undergraduate WBB transfer I can think of was
Brooke Smith, and she was admitted as a frosh, chose Duke, and then decided to transfer back home to Cali. And that was... 20 years ago!