When you get down to it, the world is a transfer portal. That doesn’t mean our sports have to be.
The main complaint you hear, from those with grey temples, is that their favorite teams keep changing. Why can’t it be Garvey, Lopes, Russell and Cey anymore? Why can’t we go back to the days when freshmen became sophomores, then juniors, then seniors? Next thing you know, they’ll do away with paper programs.
College basketball lost its stability long ago, with freshmen surging through the turnstile and into the draft. But thanks to unlimited transfers, many teams will be unrecognizable in the fall, even to themselves.
The NCAA gave student-athletes an extra year of COVID-19 relief after the truncated 2019-20 season. Now it no longer requires a player to sit out during his transfer year (although he must do so if he transfers another time in a five-year period).
It already permitted immediate fifth-year play for those who had put in four years, the infamous “grad-transfer” clause. The doors are open and the coaches and players are bumping into each other like Black Friday shoppers.
“I’ve said that it’s like giving every guy a chance to scroll through Tinder,” said UC Irvine coach Russell Turner. “You know they’re going to do it. What concerns you is the tampering, and the coaches don’t have to do it directly. Just talk to the kid’s AAU coach and say, ‘Hey, if he’s looking to go somewhere, we’d love to have him.’”
The obvious impact is a larger gap between kings and paupers. Davidson’s Kellan Grady is a prime-timer who has transferred to Kentucky. He was a senior, but Jaylen Gardner of East Carolina was a junior, and a first-team American Athletic Conference pick besides. Gardner will play at Virginia.
Remember Tanner Groves, the redheaded mountain man with the headband who did whatever he wanted against Kansas in the first round? Eastern Washington just watched him sail away to Oklahoma for his grad-transfer year.
EWU coach Shantay Legans also left, for Portland. That was the logic behind the instant-transfer rule. Coaches leave for greener Audis all the time. Why can’t the players? Their loyalty was rewarded with entrapment.
As we’ve seen, all that separated the players and coaches was the opportunity – along with proper compensation. Name, Image and Likeness compensation is coming to fix that, and soon you’ll have Chevrolet dealerships in Stillwater promising more commercials than Ford dealerships in Iowa City.
There are more than 1,000 players in the portal. As Turner says, a player might be surprised to learn how quickly he is replaced.
The days of signing four nuclear freshmen and building a sustained, four-year team have gone the way of directory assistance. Today, it’s newsworthy when a phenom spends all four years at the same high school.
“It hurts from the standpoint that fans like to identify with a team over a period of time,” Turner said. “They enjoy watching it grow. But the same arguments could have been made in pro sports about free agency.
“One thing you have to do is make sure the players are having a good experience. But, you know, that’s what you should have been doing anyway.”
Bob Bender actually was on the roster for two NCAA championship games. His Indiana team won in 1976, his Duke team lost in 1978. Back then, transferring was a symbol of conflict or weakness. Several Indiana players fled the rage of Bob Knight. Most coaches were wary of the washouts, and North Carolina had a policy against them.
“Somebody who was part of the Carolina ‘coaching tree’ was asked about transfers one time and he said, ‘I ought to call them quitters,’” Turner said.
Today the Tar Heels welcome Brady Manek from Oklahoma and Justin McKoy from Virginia, but they lost Walker Kessler to Auburn.
Baylor welcomed talent from Auburn, UNLV, Texas, Presbyterian and UNC Asheville and weaved it into a national championship. Gonzaga had Andrew Nembhard from Florida and Aaron Cook from Southern Illinois, and UCLA had Johnny Juzang from Kentucky.
What’s easier? Trying to herd skittish freshmen into a system, or gathering veterans who might have played 50 Division I games already? The top teams will do both.
“I hear coaches talk about how they have to recruit constantly now, and I think, come on, man, you’re oversimplifying it,” Turner said. “We all have to manage our rosters. It’s additional difficulty, but additional opportunity, too.”
And maybe it just hardens the collective appeal of the scholastic game. The name on the front of the jersey is the only one you need to know.
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