Why transfer portal won’t ruin Memphis
They all looked so happy less than a week ago celebrating that National Invitation Tournament title.
Boogie Ellis was wearing the cutdown net around his neck and and declared a few hours later on social media, “Memphis has to have the best fans in the NATION!”
D.J. Jeffries, only a couple games removed from saying how important it would be for the Tigers to “just stay together,” bounced along with Ellis and couldn't stop laughing at the deliriously happy scene playing out in front of him. Damion Baugh stood nearby in the corner, straddling two locker stalls and filming everything on his cell phone.
Three days later they were all gone, lost to the NCAA transfer portal that features more players than ever this offseason.
Here's the bad news: The
transfer portal is ruining college basketball as we came to love it.
Here's the good news: The transfer portal isn't likely to ruin Memphis basketball so long as Penny Hardaway is around.
Here's reality: The transfer portal isn't going anywhere because the players deserve the freedom to transfer without penalty if they so choose, even if it's not good for the health of the sport, or their careers.
What played out this week in Memphis is the present and future of college basketball, and it is on full display this weekend during the Final Four.
Four of Baylor's top six scorers got there via transfer. Houston has six transfers on its roster, including three of its top four scorers. UCLA'S best player, Johnny Juzang, is a transfer from Kentucky. Including Gonzaga, there will be eight transfers in the starting lineup of the four teams still vying for a national championship.
This year, however, the trend has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the expectation that the NCAA is about to institute a blanket one-time transfer waiver for football, men's basketball, women's basketball, ice hockey and baseball that was already in place for its other sports. A new era is here.
“It's high time we're at the point where they have that flexibility,” Memphis athletics director Laird Veatch said. “The conversation I have with all of our coaches is the importance of just maintaining that core group of student-athletes on your team.”
Memphis basketball is in the middle of this quandary — trying to maintain enough of the nucleus from last month's encouraging NIT run while dealing with how transient major college sports have become. The latest development came Friday when freshman Jordan Nesbitt entered the transfer portal less than three months after arriving on campus.
The Tigers have now had six players transfer from the program since the beginning of the season. It's a lot of defections. It also won't faze Hardaway.
He is uniquely positioned to handle this uncertain dynamic because of his experience in grassroots and high school basketball, where rosters change frequently. He's also as involved in the recruiting process as any college head coach, and the recruiting process is morphing yet again.
A job that once just involved scouring the high school ranks for players changed because of the rise of grassroots basketball and the one-and-done era at the turn of the century, and then it changed again to include the graduate transfer market last decade. Today, the transfer portal is as important to building a competitive team as the pick-and-roll and it more acutely affects basketball than football due to the smaller roster size.
So a year after securing commitments from two of the nation's top transfers (Landers Nolley II and Deandre Williams), Hardaway will likely do the same this year.
But it's nonetheless OK to lament what's happening to college basketball, and the forces that are forcing coaches like Hardaway to rebuild their rosters every offseason. Most players no longer enter college focused on making a long NCAA Tournament run like the fans cheering for them do. They enter college looking for the fastest path to the NBA, even if it's impossible for most of them to make the NBA.
They deserve the opportunity to think like that, however misguided it may be in some cases. They deserve a mulligan when picking a school, particularly in the pandemic when campus visits and in-person interaction between player and coach are basically nonexistent in recruiting. If coaches can leave for another job without penalty, players should be able to leave for another school without penalty.
But their constant movement is to the detriment of college basketball's popularity, especially in places like Memphis where the sport is part of the fabric of the community.
Memphis fans built connections to the players that made it to the 1973 national championship game, relationships that live on now between the city and the Tigers. Same for the group that went to the 1985 Final Four, and the 2007-08 Tigers that nearly won a national title. These bonds were built over time, over years of games together, and what made this week so disheartening is that a bond seemed to be forged with these Tigers during their surge through the second part of the season.
How else to describe what happened at Wilson Air Center on Sunday, when a throng of fans lined the chain-link fence to greet the victorious Memphis players when they returned with their NIT title? Then the team bus rolled up to the Laurie-walton Family Basketball Center on campus and another collection of fans were waiting for their arrival.
They had homemade signs and posed for pictures with their favorite players, a welcome respite from the separation and isolation caused by the pandemic. That's when Ellis sent out his message praising Memphis and the fans, a tweet that turned out to be as temporary as it was tender.
Because four more Memphis players are gone now, devoured by the dilemma that's devouring college basketball.
What's best for the players isn't what's best for the game.