AL Brown High School football coach Mike Newsome is frustrated.

One of the state’s most successful coaches, a state champion with a long history of producing college-level talent, Newsome said it’s harder than ever to get kids into college on an athletic scholarship. The reason? He says it’s simple:

The NCAA transfer portal has changed the game.

National Signing Day is Wednesday, and Newsome thinks fewer N.C. kids will be able to celebrate than normal.

Rivals.com reported that more than 3,000 players had entered the portal since August. That includes more than 1,400 at the FBS level — college football’s upper echelon that includes UNC, N.C. State, Charlotte and Appalachian State. Those players are battling high school kids for roster spots.

And it seems the college kids are winning.

Nearly of Power 5 players in the portal have committed to or signed with new schools, according to Rivals.com, and more than 40 percent of the next tier — the Group of 5 schools — have done the same thing.

The evidence at the high school level is more anecdotal. The Observer spoke to 12 high school coaches around North Carolina who all had the same message: The transfer portal is hurting their players.

“That portal has hurt high school kids more than anything,” Newsome said. “It’s taken opportunities away. I talked to a coach in Florida last week, and he said those schools down there are recruiting solely from the portal.”

Let’s pause here for a little history.

In the old days, if a college player wanted to transfer, he had to sit out a year before he could play at his new school. Last spring, in the middle of the pandemic, the NCAA switched gears from a policy that had been in place since the 1960s.

It decided to allow players to transfer one time and play right away.

It also changed recruiting — right away.

Longtime Oakland men’s basketball coach Greg Kampe told Sports Illustrated that the switch in rules meant a switch in philosophy for coaches, who are always in win-now mode. In most cases, they would need to court experienced college transfers over green high school recruits.

“If you are building for the future,” Kampe said, “you’re going to lose your job.”

For high school coaches like Newsome, and most recruits not ranked in the top 100 or 200, there was a double whammy. Just months before that, the NCAA had granted a free year of eligibility to college athletes due to COVID-19, which has caused many college teams to miss games and sometimes entire seasons.

That meant a college senior who was going to graduate last May or June could come back to campus for an additional year. The NCAA allowed schools to go past their football scholarship limit last season to accommodate those “Super Seniors,” but now coaches must go back down — and that includes all the players on the roster who were juniors, sophomores and freshmen who got that additional year of eligibility, too.

The collateral damage was fewer scholarships available for high school kids.

Charlotte 49ers coach Will Healy, whose team has 85 scholarships, said these moves had a trickle-down effect: Some high school players who might have been playing at the highest level are now signing with schools like Charlotte or Appalachian State, and some players who might have played at that level are being pushed down to lower Division I or Division II.

And some can’t find anything at all.

“I think this is going to be the worst year for high school guys,” Healy told The Observer. “Guys in high school right now are going to be fighting this problem, and (with the bonus year and) with the transfer portal, it’s going to be tough the next couple years.”

Jacob Newman was an N.C. player of the year finalist this season at South Mecklenburg High School. He had more than 2,000 yards of offense, led the Sabres to a rare conference championship, which they shared with two other teams. He was named the SoMECK conference offensive player of the year.

According to his high school coach, Joe Evans, and his father Tim, a former NFL player, Jacob has been rated a high-level Division I talent by several programs. But he keeps hearing the same things.

“It’s very, very bad,” Jacob Newman said, driving back from a visit to Carson-Newman, a Division II school in Jefferson City, Tenn., Sunday afternoon. “These schools are not giving high school kids any opportunities right now because they are taking kids out of the portal.”

For example, Newman said he had been offered a scholarship from a powerhouse program on the west coast on a Sunday. He was excited and was ready to commit. But when he called back two days later, the school had decided to continue looking at the portal and talked to him about being a preferred walk-on.

He had a similar experience with D1 school up north.

“I called and tried to commit to them,” Newman said, “and they told me I couldn’t commit there. I asked why, and they told me it was because they were going with an older guy. They didn’t have an older guy they had in mind, but they just wanted one.

“It’s frustrating. I worked hard to get these offers. It hurts. Now we’re trying to scramble.”

Newman’s father, Tim, once played for the New York Jets and is now head coach and athletic director at the University of Virginia Lynchburg, which plays in the National Christian College Athletic Association. Newman sees the issue from both sides — as a parent of a kid trying to go to college, and as a coach trying to help his team win.

“Recruiting has changed tremendously,” Newman said. “I know personally how bad it is for the high school player, but in order for us (as coaches) to win and keep our jobs, we’ve got to keep older guys. The sad thing to me though, you take a guy who had a scholarship and now he’s disgruntled and he wants to leave. He can go play right away but the high school kid, who has not done anything wrong and had a great career gets skipped over because college coaches want to win.”

Evans, Newman’s high school coach, notes that Johnson C. Smith, a Division II school, offered his star running back a scholarship. He thinks Newman would be a three-time All-CIAA player there.

“Nothing against the CIAA,” Evans said, “but Jacob should be playing at a little bigger school. But you’re trying to find places for these kids that deserve to be higher, and you tell people it’s the portal and it’s the COVID seniors and they don’t want to hear it.”

Evans said South Mecklenburg will have five kids that will sign scholarships on Wednesday and maybe a half dozen in March and April, but he said he sees lots of kids taking PWOs, or preferred walk-on spots, that should be Division I players. His all-conference middle linebacker, Matthew Reddick, nearly took a PWO to Virginia Tech, Evans said, before Air Force offered him late.

“Colleges are simply taking more players from other colleges,” Evans said. “They’re taking kids with one or two years of college film instead of a high school kid they have to develop and put time into.”

Evans said just a few years ago if he called coaches about his 6-foot-8, 335-pound offensive tackle Taron Williams, who has been a three-year starter, that “college coaches are flying to South Meck to see this kid.”

Williams committed to N.C. Central last week.

“Now it’s like, ‘Yeah we got a kid we really like at the same position with a year or two of college film already,” Evans said. “It’s ridiculous, man. Teron’s best football is ahead of him but he got a preferred walk-on to Charlotte, and honestly, there’s not one kid on Charlotte’s roster who looks like him, a 6-8, 335-pound athlete with arms that can scratch his ankles.”

New Johnson C. Smith coach Maurice Flowers understands what recruits like Newman and Williams are dealing with. He feels he was under-recruited out of high school at East Mecklenburg, and he went on to become a Division II All-American at Smith.

But as a coach, he also understands what his job is.

“A lot of contracts for colleges are you win now and a lot of those are three-year deals,” Flowers said. “If you recruit a bunch of freshmen, very rarely do they come ready to play no matter how good they were in high school. They need time to develop and now coaches don’t have that time, so they go to the portal and get older guys who are ready to play.”

Flowers said he uses the portal carefully. He doesn’t want guys who were problems on other teams and isn’t really interested in guys who will only play for one season.

“You can’t buy into everything your program stands for in one year,” Flowers said. “The university we work for has history and we want you to learn to love the university and you can’t do that in a semester and a half.”

Still, the lure of having an experienced 22- or 23-year-old player versus an 18-year-old freshman is strong, Flowers admits, though he said he plans to build mainly through high school recruiting and development.

Flowers’ advice to parents and recruits is to keep grades high because it opens more doors. He also believes the trickle-down recruiting will make Division II and NAIA programs stronger and more competitive than ever, and he thinks players can become pros outside of Division I.

“Everybody wants to play on TV every Saturday,” Flowers said. “But we were on ESPN-plus five times last year at Fort Valley State. We had two NFL prospects. Very few guys slip through the cracks now because of talent. There are so many scouts and so many ways to scout good college players. All 32 NFL teams have been by Fort Valley State (where Flowers coached last year) to see our players.”

At Charlotte, Healy said the 49ers will sign 14 high school players in this season’s recruiting cycle and take five transfers and that he wants a 2-to-1 or 3-to-1 ratio of high school recruits versus transfers.

Like Flowers, he’s careful about taking transfers who can fit into his program, and said that because of the new recruiting landscape he’s seeing high school kids commit earlier than ever.

“What you’re seeing is better high school players that don’t have offers,” Healy said. “If you have an offer from any (school) that is playing college football, then you’re a really good player. Most coaches want an immediate fix and don’t have time for development. Coaches get fired very quickly these days and coaches want to make sure you get good now, and that’s what the portal allows you to do.”

Back in Kannapolis, Newsome, the AL Brown coach, worries about the lessons we are teaching young people.

“We’re in an age where if things are not going your way, young people need to find another way, to leave,” he said. “We need to teach our kids to work through things.”

Newsome coached in the Queen City Senior Bowl in December, an all-star game for seniors in the greater Charlotte-area. He said he saw plenty of unsigned prospects who had the grades and passed the “eye test.” Then he watched many of them play and thought they were sure-fire college recruits.

“I saw kids who can absolutely play,” Newsome said. “You talk to them, and you think, ‘Maybe it’s grades,’ and they’ve got a 3.5 (GPA). Five years ago, these kids would be getting an opportunity and get their education paid for, which is so big for these kids and their families. Now some of them are not getting that because one kid was disgruntled and decided to go in the portal.”

Newsome said his school will have four kids that sign Wednesday and it had another that signed in the December early signing period.

“And in today’s environment, you need everything you can get.”