Is the transfer portal good for college basketball?

Sahvir Wheeler was one of five transfers in UK's top seven players this year. (Photo by Vicky Graff)

How many times have you seen this come across your social media feed lately; “Former 5-star athlete enters the transfer portal” or “experienced player from (insert university name here) has thrown his name into the portal?’

For anyone that is keeping score (I know, it’s almost impossible) @verbalcommits says there are approximately 1,000 college basketball players in the transfer portal now and more are expected to enter the portal throughout the month of April.

Some are players from smaller schools looking to move up in competition, some are experienced players looking to play their last year at a school that provides them with a better opportunity to showcase their talents, and some are high-level sophomores and juniors that feel like the grass may be greener somewhere else. And then, of course, you have situations like the one at LSU where the incumbent coach is fired and almost the entire team has entered the portal. 

So, is this good for college basketball? I realize at first glance it appears to be a great advantage for players to be able to move freely from one team to another without penalty but is that really what’s best for their careers? For a lot of players the answer is yes. Many of the teams playing in the Sweet 16, Elite 8 and Final Four this year are made up of a high percentage of transfers. 

Jim Larranaga is the head coach of the Miami Hurricanes and Naismith Coach of the Year in 2013. His team reached the Elite 8 for the first time ever in the history of the school. He believes that it is great for college players.

 “There’s been two major changes in college basketball recently: NIL, which is terrific for the student-athletes; and the transfer portal, which has allowed student-athletes to transfer and play right away. So with that being now the norm, a lot of kids are transferring. In the ACC, I don’t know what it is in the Big 12, but in the ACC, half the players in our league are new. They’re either freshmen or transfers. That’s a lot. Half your team. Not our team, every team. And that’s where college basketball is going,” he said at a recent NCAA press conference.

So based on the analysis of a long-time veteran coach like Larranaga, the portal is good for the players and is most likely here to stay. He went on to say his opinion about why so many players are in the portal, “Kids wanting to get back closer to home who went away. Or, I’m sitting on the bench someplace but I think I could start at the other school. There’s so much input in a player’s life from his family, from his coaches, and they’re always doing what I think we all do — they’re always looking for the best situation possible for them to realize their dream. And I think it’s very, very normal. So I just think that that’s what’s happened.” 

Larranaga went on to say that the portal has had a profound impact on how college coaches now manage their rosters.

“You have to recruit the transfer portal because bringing in high school kids alone makes you very, very young. And unless those are the one-and-dones, you’re probably not going to be able to compete at a high level,” the coach said.

The portal isn’t just impacting men’s basketball. The UK women’s team saw a exodus of three key players when Treasure Hunt, Dre’una Edwards and Jazmine Massengill all entered the transfer portal after UK’s season ending loss to Princeton.

“The portal is part of college athletics right now, unfortunately, and you don’t want to lose anyone in your program. I am confident in myself as a coach and a person, and what our staff does for our student-athletes on and off the court. I have a group of athletes on campus and signees that are excited about Kentucky women’s basketball,” UK coach Kyra Elzy said.

And that’s really how every coach is going to approach the problem; build up the players you already have and try to stay on top of the players that are entering the portal to add to your roster.

Elzy said as much when she said, “We’re back to business as usual. We’re on the phone talking to recruits and there are a lot of future Wildcats that are still excited about our program.”

So it appears that the implementation of the portal (and the no-penalty transfer rule) has been good for players but has it worked for the overall good of college sports? 

A Wall Street Journal article from April of 2021 stated that there would be 4,500 NCAA Division 1 full scholarship men’s basketball players playing during the 2021-2022 season. Of those 4,500 players it is estimated that at the end of the 2021-2022 season approximately 28 percent, or about 1,260 of those players, will have entered their names into the transfer portal.

Even with those type numbers, count ESPN basketball analyst Jay Bilas as one who also believes the portal is a good thing.

“Unpaid students should not be limited in their choice of destination. It strains the mind to believe that a high school player with no college experience should be required to make a binding commitment yet after having college experience suddenly cannot be trusted to decide whether staying or leaving is right for him. The transfer portal is clunky and has some problems, but those can be remedied by some sensible regulation. Forcing a player to sit out a year should not be one of those regulations,” Bilas said on ESPN.

“Several high-profile coaches are complaining about rival coaches recruiting transfers off of their rosters, and I don’t doubt that is happening. However, that phenomenon is more reflective of the ethics of the coaching profession. Who should pay the price for such actions? Why should players be subject to a transfer penalty because some coaches are not behaving ethically?  To a university, players are assets — valuable assets. Yet unless they are paid under contract, they should be allowed to move as they wish, with reasonable regulation as to the timing of decisions.”

So it appears that although most coaches don’t seem to love the portal they realize that it can be good for the players and could possibly benefit their teams. Sports analysts like Bilas believe that college athletes are now finally getting a fair shake with the implementation of the transfer portal but there are some downsides to it. 

One unintended consequence of the implementation of the portal is it now limits scholarship opportunities for high school seniors. Here’s what I mean. Because college athletes received an extra COVID year and the transfer portal kicked into high gear coaches are holding more scholarships open for upperclassmen — either for players that may return from the portal or for new players that may be recruited out of the portal — which leaves less spots available for graduating high school seniors. 

Another unintended consequence of the portal is that players who enter their name in the portal may ultimately get left out of the game. Scott Frost, head football coach at Nebraska, likened it to a game of musical chairs. He said that if a player enters their name in the portal then the school is no longer obligated to hold that scholarship open and can award it to any player of their choice.

That means a player could enter their name in the portal, lose their current scholarship and then not find any school that is willing to offer them a new scholarship — or at least not a school that they believe is a step up from their current situation. 

It’s pretty obvious that although there are some pluses for the portal there are also some minuses and not every coach is as enamored with the portal as Larranaga. You can count women’s coaches Jeff Walz oft UofL, Dawn Staley of South Carolina and Geno Auriemma of UConn as big detractors of the portal — even though they all have key players that they recruited through the portal.

“I like to say the grass is always greener on the other side because it’s fertilized with a lot of bull. I think there are a lot of players who will jump into the portal after the first year without a good grasp of why they are doing it,” Walzz said.

“Is it out of hand? Absolutely it is. I don’t know how you control it. But it’s their way. Their way of controlling their own destinies,” Staley said.

Auriemma was even tougher when he noted that there were more players seeking to transfer than there were scholarships available in women’s basketball across the country. “You know those 850 people in the portal? Three hundred of them are not going to find a school to go to because they are going to realize it’s not the school they just left,” he said.

So it appears that concerning the transfer portal, a few things are obvious. It gives players more flexibility to do whatever they want, whenever they want without any penalties but it does carry some risk for the player and it makes a coach’s job much tougher.

Roster management has become almost unmanageable because coaches have to try to re-recruit existing players while scouting the portal for new players while also evaluating high school talent and projecting which of those players will be impact players at the college level.

Add to that the limitation of new scholarships for graduating high school seniors and one can see that it seems to have become a Pandora’s Box of college sports. Like Pandora, college sports has found that a box that looked so inviting earlier now has had the lid lifted, some bad things are coming out and unfortunately there is no way to get them back in the box and close the lid. 

At this point in the process every college coach, player and fan base may as well accept that free agency has come to college sports and there’s not much they can do about it. The revolving door of players moving from one school to the other will give most fans the feeling I had back in the late 1970’s when free agency in Major League Baseball created a break up of the Big Red Machine in Cincinnati and caused me to never look at Major League Baseball the same way again.

I’m hoping I don’t feel the same way about college sports in a few years but I’m not holding my breath.