The transfer portal: A land of contrasts

Will Smith and the English band The Clash.

Wait, I thought this article was about the transfer portal, not music. Going to tie both of them into the craziness of the month-long portal season.

Should I Stay or Should I Go?

There we go, that’s one. The Clash released that hit song in the early 80s. You’re welcome, it’s now stuck in your head.

That is the question that faces every single college basketball player each year now. Should they stay at their current school or test the waters and see what else is out there.

Up until 2021, athletes generally had to sit out a full season for transferring. That’s when they were allowed to switch schools once without penalty. The one-time transfer rule setup lasted just three years, and now players can move as many times as they want with out sitting out.

Nearly 4,000 players between men’s and women’s basketball across the country entered their names in the transfer portal this offseason during its 30-day open window period. For men’s hoops, it was March 24 – April 22. The women’s portal was March 25 – April 23. More on the timing later.

The 2,300-plus men’s players in the portal is an increase of more than 11% from last year’s portal class.

“Today, they’re sort of incentivized to find out what are the opportunities if [they] go and put [their names] in the portal,” Fanstake CEO Greg Glass said in a recent interview with Mid-Major Madness. “It’s not just financial. I think it’s all about just broader opportunities in general. My whole position has always been most of these athletes, have four years of eligibility, and they’re not going to be playing at the next level.”

But where do these players go? Are mid-major players moving up to the power conferences? What about players moving down to a smaller conference?

Matt Brown and his Extra Points newsletter looked into that exact question. He broke Division I into three tiers: Tier 1 was the Power Four plus the Big East, Tier 2 was Atlantic 10, American, Mountain West and West Coast Conference, and Tier 3 was everyone else.

The study found that 61% of the players from Tier 3 transferred down (meaning out of Division I) or did not find a home.

Only 7% of the players from Tier 3 jumped to Tier 1. Tier 2 saw 16% move up to Tier 1.

But, there are stories of players parlaying success at the mid-major level into massive power conference achievements. Walter Clayton Jr. began at Iona and was named the Most Outstanding Player on Florida’s run to the national championship this season. Johni Broome was a Morehead State Eagle before turning into a first-team All-American and national Player of the Year for a historically great Auburn team. Dalton Knetch went from JUCO, to Northern Colorado, to Tennessee and turned into a first-round NBA Draft pick.

“On one hand, I think it’s a real positive for the individual to be able to play your way into a higher profile program,” said Brown, the publisher and founder of Extra Points said in a recent interview with us. “But, even if you go and you don’t make it and you don’t play very much, you have to recognize that there’s a significant financial component that comes from this, especially this year with all these schools kind of to get out ahead of the House settlement and our front loading contracts and our and are just throwing really stupid amounts of money.”

Ahh, there it is. Money.

Not only has the transfer portal completely changed the college sports landscape. Throw in NIL, which came in right around the same time as the new transfer rules.

All I can think of is Shane McMahon’s WWE entrance.

“Here comes the money

Money, money, money, money

Money, money, money, money, money

Ching ching, bling bling, cut the chatter

You ain’t talking money, then your talking don’t matter”

Yup, welcome to the world we now live in.

Players were not able to make money (within the confines of NCAA rules) while playing in college before this change, and now some are able to make life-altering money as college athletes.

“If you’re a kid who’s, I don’t know, the third best player at Weber State, and if you stay all four years at Weber State, you can become a nice Big Sky player, maybe play in the NIT and Utah’s willing to throw $450,000 at you to go play for Utah,” Brown said. “Even if you suck ass, you got $450,000. Brother, that’s a house. That’s more money than you’ll probably ever make the rest of your life, even if you have a six-year European basketball career. It’s very difficult to go tell somebody you shouldn’t take the money, even if it’s a worse basketball or education opportunity for you, because it’s a lot of money.”

Tough to argue with that. Especially when you think of the old NCAA commercials that state there are over 400,000 NCAA student-athletes who will be going pro in something other than sports.

So, isn’t college sports pro anyway now?

Kinda!

“This is professional sports,” Glass said. “This is the second largest league in the world, behind only the NFL (if you talk about NCAA sports at large). They should monetize it with the four years that they do. And so, they have a limited window to maximize those capabilities. It’s not just money. It’s also playing time. It’s also visibility. It’s also fitting into a program that’s going to develop you.”

But it’s regulated, right? There are guidelines in place, aren’t there?

Enter Will Smith.

The Wild, Wild West

Everything is changing at warp speed. And there doesn’t seem to be any slowing down anytime soon.

As already stated, the portal continues to grow with each season. NIL is booming. Programs are implementing general managers to oversee athlete marketing and manage NIL – positions that wouldn’t have even been conceived of a decade ago.

There are no guardrails for how much a program can offer in NIL currently. Will we see a salary cap? Maybe. But, what makes you think that a salary cap would fully eradicate that part of it. Schools are bound to find ways around it. Think signing bonuses.

“I look at everything happening right now and I could say it’s probably, on the net, a positive for athletes,” Brown said. “I can see benefits for both high-major and mid-major programs, but I have a lot of empathy for anybody that works in college sports right now that’s deeply frustrated with how much and how quickly everything is changing, how little they understand the rules, and how much harder it is to run any kind of consistent program because roster management has now become so explicitly transactional at almost every level in men’s basketball.”

The rules … What are those?

Well, there really aren’t any at this point. We’re still waiting for the House settlement to provide some clarity.

In [Grant] House vs. NCAA, the NCAA agreed to pay about $2.8 billion to past and current athletes to settle a trio of antitrust lawsuits that claim the NCAA’s rules have limited athletes’ earning potential. In exchange, the NCAA would pretty much establish a salary cap that would limit how much each school can pay its athletes each year. The amount would begin at about $20.5 million per school per year and increase each year. Negotiations are still ongoing.

The one thing that is clear is the dates of the portal. Late March through late April.

Q: Why? Doesn’t it open right in the middle of the NCAA Tournament and other postseason tournaments?

A: YES.

Q: Isn’t that horrible timing?

A: Again, YES.

“The timing is broken,” Glass said. “The fact that this happens during the Tournament – and the excuse being it has to align with school schedules, there’s so much that the NCAA and schools do to work with athletes to get around it. You see things like conference realignment, where if you can figure out how to fly Stanford and Cal to the east coast to be in the ACC, you can figure out how to push this three weeks. It’s a little bit disingenuous in my mind that they can’t seem to find a way to adjust that. And I think, in some ways, they’re just keeping their head in the sand on that, but obviously that’s hugely impactful, both for the coaches and the players, where it’s a major distraction at the core time when you want everyone really focused on the game in front of them.”

It seems pretty simple to push the dates of the portal back a few weeks. How about April 10-May 10? It’s still during the spring semester and before summer break, and it’s after the conclusion of the season.

This way players and coaches can actually devote their full attention to completing for a championship this season as opposed to working towards next season while the postseason is ramping up.

Conclusion

Coaches are allowed to move around each year without facing penalties outside of buyouts, so the players should be able to as well. We all can agree on that.

“I look at [the transfer portal] as a tool,” Brown said. “It is a tool that exists because of the weird legal no man’s land that is being a college basketball player right now. I look at it as morally and probably athletically neutral.”

But there needs to be some guidelines and specifications put in place. The transfer portal/NIL era has come in like a buzzsaw. Where it’s headed? No one knows, but it will certainly be interesting.