Roster chaos born of NIL money and the transfer portal have turned college hoops upside-down

LAWRENCE, Kan. (AP) — KJ Adams Jr. is sitting in a corner of Hadl Auditorium, just down the hallway from Allen Fieldhouse, the historic home of the top-ranked Kansas basketball team, and the place that the senior forward has called home for the past four years.

He is a rarity these days, when players are allowed to transfer freely, often in the pursuit of lucrative name, image and likeness contracts that could make a handful of them instant millionaires. Adams joined the Jayhawks out of high school, played important minutes on a national championship team as a freshman, and has never wavered in his commitment to the program.

“I think it would be cool if more guys stayed four years,” Adams says, glancing around the room at eight newcomers — including six transfers — that form the backbone of this year's team. “You miss all the guys that have come and gone.”

Even at Kansas, a destination school for so many, Adams has played with 32 scholarship teammates during his career.

Yet such roster change is a fact of life in major college basketball, perhaps more than in football or any other sport. Entire teams can change almost overnight, and players that started for them one season can be starting against them the next.

To wit: There were roughly 700 players who elected to transfer from Division I programs five years ago. That number nearly tripled this past offseason, a gargantuan number made even larger by upperclassmen who were granted an extra year of eligibility because their careers collided with the pandemic.

There might have been no better example than Arkansas, where John Calipari is taking over after 15 years with Kentucky.

The Hall of Fame coach arrived in Fayetteville in April to find that 13 players had transferred, graduated or quit in the days after Eric Musselman left for Southern California. Calipari was fortunate that Trevon Brazile ultimately withdrew from the NBA Draft and returned to the Razorbacks; otherwise, he would have been starting entirely from scratch.

“I met with the team,” Calipari said upon his hiring, “and there is no team.”

There is now, of course. Calipari simply did what every coach has been forced to do: He mined the transfer portal. Three of his new players were relatively easy sells, given they came along from Kentucky, and three more transfers — including the coveted guard Johnell Davis from FAU and forward Jonas Aidoo from Tennessee — eventually joined the Razorbacks.

That new-look team, incidentally, beat the top-ranked Jayhawks in a charity exhibition game last Friday night.

“It is easier to build a roster. It is infinitely harder to build a program,” Colorado coach Tad Boyle said, perhaps most succinctly summing up the thoughts of college basketball coaches everywhere, from the power conferences to the low-majors.

It's also really stressful, and for some coaches, not what they signed up for. That was the case for Virginia coach Tony Bennett, who decided two weeks before the start of the season to retire, explaining he was better suited for the old days when he would build a program around freshmen who might stay the entire careers.

Remember those relationships that coaches began with high school kids and their families, carefully nurtured over several years of recruiting? They've taken a backseat to the portal, and what Iowa State women's coach Bill Fennelly called “speed-dating.”

“I mean, you've got to get moving,” he said. “They go in the portal and you better get ready, get organized and have a plan.”

It helps to have the weight of NIL money behind you, too. When the NCAA began allowing players to profit off themselves in 2021, the result was tantamount to free agency, where players are tempted by lucrative packages offered by a school's boosters.

“You may not be able to go always get everybody you want that fits what you want because you may not quite frankly have the money for it,” Oklahoma State coach Steve Lutz said. “It’s almost like having a budget and having to prioritize who you want.”

It works both ways, though. NIL money is also a big reason some marquee players decided to stay put.

“Five years ago, I wouldn't have been here,” said All-American guard Mark Sears, whose NIL package at No. 2 Alabama was enough to sway him to pull out of the NBA draft and return to the Crimson Tide for his final season of eligibility.

Some schools, such as Cincinnati and Iowa State, returned most of their players from last season, and they used the transfer portal to merely supplement that core. But whereas in the past they represented the majority, they now are the minority, and it has created a college basketball season full of teams that look nothing like they did a year ago.

With so few rules in place, it might be that way next year — and the year after that, too.

“Really everyone is trying to do things year-to-year," said Baylor coach Scott Drew, who had three players transfer out and four in since last season. “I don't think anyone has a long-term plan until someone knows what the long-term rules will be.”

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