Al Amadou Has Entered The Transfer Portal

The late announcement of his redshirt option for the 2025-26 season may have been an early warning light here.

I never like saying or even thinking that so-and-so player is going to transfer at the end of a season. I like the idea of the player and the coaching staff working together to make everyone better and succeeding in that goal.

But, sometimes, an announcement of a transfer is an unsurprising last car on a train of information. That’s kind of how I feel about Thursday’s news that Marquette men’s basketball forward Al Amadou has entered the transfer portal.

Amadou came to Marquette as a part of the 2023 recruiting class alongside Caedin Hamilton, Zaide Lowery, and Tre Norman. Amadou appeared in 14 games for a total of 52 minutes in the 2023-24 season, and played the part of The World’s Best Teammate. Most of his minutes came alongside the walk ons and Amadou was consistently going out of his way to bust his butt to give the walk ons their best chance to shine. At the end of the season, I didn’t even give him a grade on his first campaign in blue and gold because it’s unfair to judge 52 minutes of action that way.

As Marquette prepared for the 2024-25 season, it apparently became clear to head coach Shaka Smart that the best path forward for Amadou was to spend the year on the bench as a redshirt. Given that we did not find out that was going to be the case until after Marquette’s season opener, it certainly seems like that was a late call by Smart and his staff in cooperation with Amadou. I said at the time, in the wake of seeing Royce Parham’s debut against Stony Brook, that it appeared that the issue was more than Parham had jumped Amadou on the depth chart than anything else.

It certainly seems like the conversation that led to Amadou redshirting — and protecting a year of eligibility instead of playing 50-ish minutes again — has ultimately led to Amadou believing that there’s more playing time available to him somewhere else. The fact of the matter is that basketball players like playing basketball, and this news certainly finishes drawing a picture that tells us that there wasn’t going to be much basketball playing in Amadou’s future in Milwaukee.

And so, a brand new scholarship chart, and right after I freshened it up earlier in the week and everything……

Amadou’s departure leaves Marquette with 13 projected players for the 2025-26 season and two projected available spots with a roster limit of 15 under the rules of the (still yet to be finalized) House settlement. I wrote earlier this week that there is no reason to expect that Shaka Smart will do any portal recruiting unless there was a subtraction from his roster by way of the portal. That has now happened, so the question now becomes this: Is Smart interested in shaking up his projected rotation for 2024-25 because he lost a player who miiiiiight have not been projected as a major contributor anyway? Finding playing time for 13 guys isn’t the easiest thing in the world in the first place, so I could easily make the argument that I can’t see Smart making any changes. My point that Marquette is not going to get into a bidding war with anyone in the portal remains most likely true, so for now, I think the best attitude towards portal recruiting is “I dunno, maybe?”