Jordan Kwiatkowski gave the transfer portal a courtesy look late last year, as most college football players with his credentials tend to do when there’s a coaching change.

He spent about two weeks in the portal, being inundated daily with text messages, DMs and emails.

“I called it ‘speed dating,’” Kwiatkowski said with a laugh this week. “It did get overwhelming.”

All it took was a one-on-one meeting with new Central Michigan head football coach Matt Drinkall last December to ease Kwiatkowski’s mind and convince him to finish his career where he started, in Mount Pleasant. Mostly, he liked Drinkall’s insistence on making the CMU program a player-led program, not a coach-led program ― and Kwiatkowski is one of those leaders, and one of the captains, who anchors a defense that will be p

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