In the new age of college basketball, when players can transfer as many times as they like without sitting out a season, coaches have to reshape rosters every offseason — sometimes even during the season. Dayton Flyers coach Anthony Grant talked about the challenges last spring after another busy recruiting period that saw Dayton lose four players to the portal and add three players from it.
“It’s a new era,” Grant said. “We’re putting the team together now, and there’s a commitment that we’re asking for the next 10 months. We’re going to try to accomplish something really good together. Let’s commit to 10 months, and then let’s figure out what’s the best thing for you. What’s the best thing for us? What’s the best thing moving forward? And it doesn’t have to be a contentious thing. Let’s just figure out what’s best. What you feel is best for you I may not like, but I have to respect the fact that it’s the best thing for you. Let’s move forward, and figure it out. Whatever decision you make, you’ve got to go make that work. Then we have to figure out, ‘OK, how do we move forward based on your decision.’”
Seventeen players recruited and signed by Grant and his staff have transferred from the program since 2018. In the same time frame, Dayton has added 16 transfers from Division I programs. That’s the norm these days.
There are 364 programs in Division I and approximately 4,732 scholarship players. An increasing percentage of them are entering the portal every year. There were 2,070 players in the portal in 2024, according to the list kept by VerbalCommits.com. That was up from 1,723 in 2023. The number has more than doubled from 2019 (957) when players still had to sit out a season after transferring.
Dayton leaned on transfers for many years before the transfer portal era. From 2012-18, a transfer led the team in scoring every season: Kevin Dillard (2012-13); Jordan Sibert (2014-15); Charles Cooke (2016-17); and Josh Cunningham (2018).
While Dayton’s leading scorer the last six years has been a player who started his career with the Flyers — Obi Toppin (2019-20), Jalen Crutcher (2021) and DaRon Holmes (2022-24) — its roster has had more transfers than ever in the Grant era. That’s because starting with the 2021-22 season, transfers have been able to play right away.
Coaches can transform their roster faster than ever. Five of Dayton’s top six scorers this season — everyone but redshirt junior guard Malachi Smith — joined the program as a transfer this season or last season. Five of the eight players in the rotation at the end of last season were transfers.
Dayton isn’t alone in the A-10 in having a transfer-dominated roster. Virginia Commonwealth’s top five scorers have played for a total of 16 programs. Starters Jack Clark, Joe Bamisile and Phillip Russell are all playing for their fourth school. Max Shulga and Zeb Jackson each played for one school before transferring to VCU.
Dayton has gained more from the portal than it has lost over the years, but last spring, it lost two players who are now key players in power conferences. Koby Brea played four seasons for Dayton and is now the fourth-leading scorer (11.8 points per game) for Kentucky. Kobe Elvis, who played the last three seasons at Dayton, starts for Oklahoma and ranks fourth on the team in scoring (9.8).
Dayton replaced Brea, Elvis and other players who left after last season with three transfers and two freshmen. No one knew what to expect of this team when the season began because building a roster is one thing and turning a new group of players into a winner is another challenge.
The flood of players into the portal in the spring is overwhelming. Meanwhile, coaches have to keep track of who’s leaving their program and who’s staying. Everyone has to make fast decisions. Money complicates matters even further. Name, image and likeness deals are a big part of the process these days, and starting in the 2025-26 academic year, schools will be able to pay athletes directly.
In recent years, numerous players have had to make decisions about whether to take advantage of the extra year of eligibility given to them because of the pandemic-season of 2020-21, which didn’t count against anyone’s eligibility. Most of the players in that category will have exhaused their eligibility after this season. That will make recruiting a bit easier for coaches.
On the other hand, there are more changes coming. NCAA Division I basketball programs have always had 13 scholarships to fill. Now that number is increasing. The roster limit is expected to be 15 in future seasons.
College basketball analyst Evan Miya published a piece in June about the keys of building a roster in the age of the transfer portal. Among his findings were:
• “Returning players should account for at least 50% of the playing time.”
• Coaches “should prioritize recruiting players who will play at least two seasons” at the school.
Every coach has had to adapt. John Calipari, now at Arkansas after 14 seasons at Kentucky, where he often had a roster loaded with some of the nation’s best freshmen, knows that’s not the way to win anymore.
“We’re not going to take six, seven freshmen now,” Calipari told ESPN in May. “It’ll be three or four. Hopefully retain a few, get a couple transfers, and that is the formula.”
A-10 coaches had to plenty of their own opinions on the matter at Media Day.
Credit: David Jablonski
Credit: David Jablonski
Grant: “A lot’s changed. A lot of things kind of hit at the same time — from COVID hitting and guys that were in college getting an extra year of eligibility. Everybody’s always said that it’s the older teams that win in college basketball and college sports, period. You saw teams that had an opportunity to get old and stay old because of the fifth year. And then right after that, immediate eligibility hit. Guys could transfer and be immediately eligible to play, along with having a fifth year of eligibility. On top of that, NIL came in, where guys were able to profit off their name, image and likeness, and also have an agent that could help them in that process, which led to unintended consequences.
“All of that impacted how you thought about building your roster. Now, at least from what I see, it looks like there’s starting to be a shift where, at one point, a couple of years ago, it was really, really difficult for a freshman that wasn’t in the top 75 to 100 players to really have the opportunities that they had before because of what was available to you in the portal. Not that the portal is less important now, because I think it’s a huge piece of college athletics, but certainly I think you’re starting to see a shift back to the opportunities being there for more and more high school guys.
“So every coach is different in terms of how they choose to build their roster. For me, it’s always been about understanding the culture that we have, not only in our program, but at the University of Dayton — what guys fit and how we want to go about doing that. There’s a mix. I think that you always want to take advantage of all that’s available to you. We try to stay true to who we are.”
Keith Urgo, Fordham: “I think it has a lot to do with the institution you’re at. For us, we want to build a sustainable culture. I think it’s going to come back a little bit now the COVID years are over. I think we’re going to see a lot more freshmen being recruited because there’s only going to be so many transfers that are eligible. I think there’s going to be almost 3,000 seniors this year. For us, we have a little bit different budget for NIL than say (Dayton). We’ve got to be strategic, and we’ve got to stay older. But if you build it the right way and you have some guys in each and every class, you never really have that void that we had last year where we only had one freshman. We’re trying to do it each and every year, bringing in maybe one or two transfers that can be experienced to help us build. But it’s just different for each and every institution.”
Credit: David Jablonski
Credit: David Jablonski
Frank Martin, Massachusetts: “The most important part is you’ve got to figure out who on your team is going to stay. When the season ends and we’re in the spring, figuring out that answer is the most complicated part of our decision making. Luckily for me, we had seven guys who said they were in and they stayed. That allowed us to then go recruit guys that fit who we are and fit necessities, for lack of a better word. It’s really hard. It’s really complicated. In the end, talent is talent, and talent comes and goes, but you have to find people who are willing to coexist in the environment that we’ve created.”
Josh Schertz, Saint Louis: “I think it’s incredibly difficult. There’s no right way. For us, if you don’t have bottomless resources, relative to NIL, you have to be really judicious in how you build your roster. If you do have bottomless resources, you can just go and overhaul it and get the best players every year and try to make it work. For us, we have to layer in good young players. I think in our system, the way we play, we always talk about corporate knowledge. Corporate knowledge is an understanding of what we’re doing. I think that compounding over time, guys can make significant jumps. We want to be a program that’s about player development. So we want to be able to bring in young guys, get them better.
You utilize the portal if you have holes in your roster that you can’t fill internally. There may be a guy who doesn’t play and you think he’s ready for a big jump. Well, then you don’t have to go to the portal. But if you have a void on your team that you don’t feel like can be filled internally, then you would go use the portal. But we want to be much more about high school guys, bringing them up, trying to retain them, layering in good young players. Use the portal when we have a void. Maybe we lost somebody, or somebody graduated, or whatever the case may be, and there’s nobody in house that’s ready to step in and maybe take on that expanded role. But if we’re doing our job right, hopefully that happens less and less.”
Matt McKillop, Davidson: “I think before immediate eligibility was passed, I think we had one player transfer in the previous 10 years. That was something we were really proud of. As we recruited kids, we said, “Things are going to go bad at times, but you’re going to love it here to the point that you will find a way to make things go well.” So having a program that never was relying on transfers the way that others were, we’re so used to freshmen learning from seniors and then getting better and better.
“I think in the first eight years in the Atlantic 10, we had four players of the year, and it was because they followed that path. We want that to be the case, knowing that that may not be the case. Our belief is we’re going to recruit freshmen as we’ve always done, and then if we lose players to the transfer portal, that’s when we’ll look toward the transfer portal. We’re not holding spots, holding scholarships in the recruiting process, hoping for a transfer at the end of the year.
“Now recruiting never goes as you anticipate. A week ago, we thought we’re about to get three commitments, and now we’re hands in our pockets wondering what we’re going to do next. We will use it when it’s necessary, but we’re going to hopefully be the program that we’ve been and find the right kids. I fully believe in our staff’s ability to develop them and their willingness to get better, and hopefully four years later, they’re a player of the year or all-conference.”
Drew Valentine, Loyola Chicago: “I think it’s 50/50 (freshman vs. transfers). We have eight newcomers. We have four scholarship freshmen and four transfers. With 15 (players on the roster), it might change. Normally, we’ve had three bigs on the roster. Three point guards and three bigs is kind of what we’ve had. I think that might change to four and four. Hopefully, you can retain players. We haven’t lost anybody that I haven’t wanted to lose, and I’ve been here four seasons.
Credit: David Jablonski
Credit: David Jablonski
Archie Miller, Rhode Island: “If you would have asked me three years ago, I would have spit out an articulate answer, but the rules keep changing and the money involved keeps changing. In the last couple of falls and springs, as you head into a two-year window, your ability to retain has changed. Your ability to recruit in the portal has changed. Then the high school role has really changed. It’s really changed a lot in terms of having the perfect blueprint. You have to be really flexible in understanding each year is going to be different. The days of saying, ‘This is what we’re going to look like next year with all of our returning players,’ are gone.
“I think you have to fight really hard to develop your team year to year, and then you have to really fight hard to develop and retain your good players. Your needs have to be met. I do think the high school recruiting, once the COVID fifth-year guys are gone, the portal is going to diminish from a percentage standpoint, which is going to increase high school basketball’s value for programs like ours, where you’re not just completely invested in the portal.
“I don’t think you can depend on the portal as much anymore, with that percentage going away. There’s just going to be shorter inventory, so to speak. The role of redshirting now plays a big role. It really does from a high school perspective and from the overall numbers of scholarships moving forward, I think keeping your roster developing from within and getting older from within is really how you truly want to get old. But we have a plan this year, which was unique. We were able to bring back four guys that all started games and played minutes, two of whom were true freshmen. They’re going into their sophomore year. So I’m excited to see those guys go from year one to two.”
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