Be Prepared For Portal Charlatans

The transfer portal opens today for men’s college basketball, and I think it’s probably smart to be ready for some people to say some pretty dumb things over the next few weeks.

You guys heard about this? You know about this transfer portal thing?

Big deal in college sports these days. Technically, it’s just a spreadsheet where players that elect to transfer put their contact information so any coach can make contact with them with the added bonus of schools are required to put the players into the portal once the player informs them of their intent to transfer. It’s a net positive for the student athlete experience, as now they’re not beholden to crossing their fingers that a coach that their club team or high school team coach knows can reach out and offer them a spot.

Anyway, there’s been a lot of OH NOOOOOOOOO SO MANY TRANSFERRRRRRRS from various corners of the internet since the portal kicked into high gear over the last couple of years by way of the NCAA throwing the redshirt requirement out. Used to be if you transferred in college basketball, you had to sit out a full season…. even though that wasn’t the case for volleyball or soccer or several other sports. Now players are getting on the court the very next season and SO MUCH HANDWRINGING ABOUT IT.

Let me illustrate my point. This is just one particular pundit’s travels through the open portal window in the spring of 2024.

Yes, I am picking on Jeff Goodman here, but it’s not my fault that I knew that I could rely on him to make my point for me.

They moved it back until after the first weekend of the NCAA tournament starting this year. Credit where credit is due, because Jeff’s right on this one.

Carefully monitoring a spreadsheet and then getting everyone to tune in to his internet show to hear him talk about what a “shit show” it was that college athletes decided they would like a different experience somewhere else, brilliant work.

There is, of course, no Portal Headquarters where someone in charge of making sure a certain number of players enter every day, and if you stop to think about it, of course there would be a big initial flurry and then an immediate dropoff. Do better, Jeff.

This was sent the morning of the first day of the NCAA tournament. I presume that this is mostly Jeff complaining that he doesn’t want to watch games AND a spreadsheet at the same time…… even though no one’s really asking him to monitor every single update to the spreadsheet live as it happens.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaand now you’ve figured out the point I’m making here, which is that Jeff is just parroting complaints about the portal that he gets from coaches.

Apparently you’re being MEAN TO JEFF if you work at a university and do the data entry on the portal at 7pm at night. By the way: I like that he’s telling all the West Coast schools that no one cares what they do after 2pm local time.

We’ll get to it, but Jeff overshot his guesstimate of 2,000 portal entries.

Still on 2K, still ended up a little high.

The Portal is INSANE, subscribe to my newsletter so you can hear all about how insane it is. By the way, I’m only including posts like this and all the ones where Jeff threw out a new number of entries. I skipped over the dozens of tweets where Jeff made a BIG DEAL out of a NEW BIG ADDITION to the portal. Either it’s bad or it’s a big deal, you gotta pick a side…. or just go la-di-dah down the middle and not really care all that much.

Jeff found a new way to tell you that there are SO MANY GUYS IN THE PORTAL but actually not actually that many were playing real minutes at any Division 1 program. Congrats, buddy.

13 tweets in six weeks breathlessly updating everyone on the number of Division 1 players in the portal, more than two a week on average. All to end up with …… a little more than five players per team on average entering the portal, all while 68 jobs changed over. You think that maaaaaaaaybe things like DePaul losing every single player off their roster from last year miiiiiiiight have tilted that average? A little bit? And all along the way, Goodman was more than happy to remind you that the number includes walk-ons choosing to head somewhere else. He knows what he’s doing when he’s running to the Twitter machine to say the new number, just blowing that thing slightly out of proportion.

All of this when we know that from 2021 through 2023, somewhere between only 71% and 76% of D1 transfers ended up back on a Division 1 scholarship somewhere. Even though we know that between only 67% and 70% of players that entered the portal actually transferred anywhere at all within the NCAA structure with between 23% and 27% of transfers leaving the NCAA one way or another.

The most generous reading of this is that of the 1,882 players that entered the portal by the time it closed in May 2024, only 1,317 of them were back on an NCAA roster of any kind when play started in November 2024, and only 1,000 of those guys were actually back on a Division 1 scholarship. Oh, hey, check that out….. now that more than five guys per roster….. is down to less than three actual scholarship to scholarship transfers per team in Division 1. That’s just going on the percentages from when the NCAA studied what happened and published it, of course, could be more……. and it absolutely could be less.

Why am I going on about this? It’s not because that rather annoying fact that 20-25% of men’s college basketball players just leave the NCAA by way of the portal every single year. If Jeff Goodman wants to jump up and down because coaches are telling him to jump up and down, that’s his business.

No, the reason that I’m pointing allllll of this out……

….. is because the 2024 offseason was the last one with players holding a COVID-19 bonus season of eligibility.

In effect, last year, all four classes of Division 1 men’s basketball players were eligible to enter the portal, because the seniors had a COVID bonus year in their back pocket. Sure, some guys are still out there because they took a redshirt year along the way or they had an injury redshirt year, so there might be a few more guys on bonus seasons in 2025-26.

But widely speaking, all of the seniors this season are done when the the final horn sounds on their final game. Effectively, none of them will be transferring.

And so, I am writing all of this to make this point: Get ready for ding dongs that breathlessly tell you how many guys are in the portal to magically be praising coaches for how they have “figured out” how to coach and recruit in the portal era because there’s suddenly 15-20-25% fewer transfers than there were the last few years.

No one will have figured anything out, there just will be only three possible classes of players transferring.

And if all of a sudden, if there’s, say, 25% fewer players available, meaning there might only be 750 Division 1 scholarship to scholarship transfers available….. Do you think that maaaaaaaybe coaches that thought that they could just live entirely in the portal every single year miiiiiiiight be in a lot of trouble going forward? I’m not trying to say that Marquette head coach Shaka Smart was reading the room and doing the math on this from the get-go, because I haven’t talked to him about that. On top of that, it’s probably unlikely that Smart would say anything that would come across as critical of how other teams have been operating. But if the battles to recruit transfers about to get a lot more tense because there’s just going to be fewer available transfers, then it would certainly seem that a coaching staff and program that has emphasized internal growth and development while keeping the pipelines open with high school programs all along might just have an advantage now, right?

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