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…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/roster-chaos-born-nil-money-180839108.html

Author : Associated Press

Publish date : 2024-10-30 18:08:00

Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source.