The 2025 transfer portal: High comedy and karmic justice

After the final possession of the 2025 men's college basketball season, when Houston guard Emmanuel Sharp (literally) dropped the ball, chaos was unleashed. Portal season. Roster time. Wagon trains on the horizon. Gold rush. Prairie fever. Mass hysteria.

The 2025 transfer season had been chugging along in the background, of course, having opened March 24. Still, during the NCAA Tournament, it is -- if one is so inclined, anyway -- easy and preferable to block out the drumbeat of personnel announcements and coaching searches and with that being saids. One should deliberately hyperfocus on the hugely important games still being played. A college basketball season, especially one this good, is much too precious to squander on distractions.

Since the national title game, though, and through Tuesday, when the portal formally closed, a fuller picture has emerged. It has comprised equal parts unrestrained capitalistic fervor and disordered karmic comeuppance. After decades of restricting players' earnings to scholarships and limiting their ability to move freely, college athletics programs have experienced a sort of upside-down zenith, a total reversal of the past. Fastidious restrictions and outdated mores fully disappeared. The Old World receded. The Wild West rose.

Most of all: It has been very, very funny.

How so? Start with the money. There has been a lot of money.

Last week, CBS's Matt Norlander laid out what most coaches, administrators, agents and media have been hearing all season, well before the 2025 portal opened: At least eight schools had pooled $10 million-plus in NIL money for the purposes of 2025-26 roster construction. (Those schools: Arkansas, BYU, Duke, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisville, Michigan, North Carolina, St. John's, and Texas Tech.) A large coterie of programs (including Auburn, UConn, Florida, Houston, Kansas, Kansas State, Miami, Purdue [!], Tennessee, Texas, UCLA, USC, Villanova, and Virginia [!!]) had raised somewhere in the $8 million range -- and, hey, what's an extra $2 million if you really need to get a signing over the line?

This largesse has filtered outward, too, as mid-level high-majors attempt to keep up with the Joneses and proud mid-majors refuse to get left in the dust. Matt's "sober" estimate of the total amount of NIL money available to players across Division I was "north of" $325 million. It is likely more.

It is a hilarious number. Five years ago, save the pervasive heavy duffel handed off through shoe reps, that number was zero. Three years ago, when garish Miami booster (redundant) John Ruiz bragged about signing Kansas State transfer Nigel Pack, $400,000 was the end of the world. (Pack's transfer to Oklahoma this spring almost certainly netted him more than double that.)

Naturally, this whiplash continues to spin coaches' heads. Public complaints are rare; nobody wants to be the guy criticizing players for finally getting paid. Privately, though, coaches eyes' pop at the sums career reserves think they deserve. Those coaches also understandably lament the free-for-all nature of the contracts being signed, some of which players discard the second a better offer comes in, some of which (but not all!) schools have little interest in taking legal steps to enforce.

This spring, an extra-absurd wrinkle has emerged: Players throwing in for the portal party despite having no remaining eligibility.

The reasoning, most candidly laid out by former Clemson forward Ian Schieffelin this week, is pretty simple: If a federal judge in New Jersey prohibits the NCAA from restricting athletes to five years of eligibility, which last week it very much sounded like he may do, players like Schiefflin and Zeke Mayo could be eligible to compete. Schiefflin is pursuing a pro career, he said, but he would be worth more money plying his trade in US collegiate athletics than anywhere else in the world. It would be silly not to try.

(And yes: Auburn livewire Chad Baker-Mazara, who is and always will be older than Luka Doncic, has a non-zero chance of playing college basketball next season. LOL.)

Should coaches recruit these guys? Should they ignore them? Who knows? Who really knows anything?

You can, on some level, feel for coaches here. Almost all of them entered the profession when the requirements were fewer and the mandate was certain. You built multi-year rosters, fostered relationships, nurtured people. Almost no one enjoys the idea of re-recruiting their own roster every year -- even in the spring, when the season is over -- to say nothing of keeping everybody on board throughout the season itself, when players pocket-watch in locker rooms and whispered offers infiltrate. Coaches are very well paid, but being well paid doesn't make your job less hard.

Then again: Nothing players are doing now is different from what coaches have done for decades. Having your agent regularly gauge interest? Dreaming of a higher-profile opportunity? Getting the biggest bag you can? Leaving a place suddenly, with little warning, after repeatedly affirming your dedication? These are the features of every coaching search in the history of the sport. All along, coaches realized an outsized share of the sport's overall market value, while university and alumni resources were funneled toward a conspicuous facilities arms race. The sport's ostensible dedication to amateurism applied only to the guys on the floor. The inquality was stark. The educational mission was sporadically prioritized. Too many kids were left behind.

And so it is hard now -- even in 2025, even as the portal has descended into wildness, even as their jobs have gotten indubitably more difficult -- to brook too many complaints from coaches or administrators about how hard this all is. Sympathy is minimal. Indeed, it feels like cosmic justice. The correction has veered into overcorrection, maybe. But a correction was always coming.

This is especially true given everything Ken Pomeroy wrote recently – arguments we have also made from the beginning of the portal era. Not only is the portal a moral good – players should be paid money for playing college basketball, the end – many of the arguments against it are drastically overstated. No one feigns outrage about NBA players changing teams every year, oftentimes in the middle of the year, because it is understood those players are paid professionals operating under a combination of personal agency and the whims of their employers:

And even with universal free agency, the amount of player movement among rotation players on the Final Four teams this year is roughly in line with the player movement on the four conference finalists in the NBA playoffs last year. The top eight rotation players on each team played a total of 100 seasons, and there were 16 team changes among them (16.0%). For the NBA’s final four, there were 138 seasons among the top eight players on each team, with a total of 22 team changes (15.9%).

Of course, for teams with smaller budgets, player movement is more frequent. But this is no different than the professional game. Not everybody is Udonis Haslem. Take D.J. Burns’ current teammate and my former personal obsession, Alan Williams. Williams has played ten seasons of professional basketball and has played for seven different teams. Pick your favorite college player from the past two decades who didn’t get drafted, head to realgm.com, and you’ll probably see a guy who is changing teams nearly every season. Often mid-season!

Naturally, the teams with the most resources will have an advantage in a world like this. But (a) they had an advantage in the old world and (b) as Kansas proved, you can spend a bunch of money and fool the entire country into thinking you did the best job building a roster, only to result in a first-round exit. It hardly seems like a reason to declare the sport is headed for doom.

Meanwhile, above all, the portal is producing fantastic basketball. It really is! The product on the floor has never been better; the skill, experience, and tactics vastly outstrip the game we started out covering in the late aughts. It has been great for keeping fans engaged, too, because your bad team can always get good again right away. (Reminder: Missouri finished 0-18 in the 2024 SEC.) There are trade-offs, sure. Fans get annoyed when players leave. Mid-major coaches realize less multi-season benefit from savvy scouting. But these power imbalances have always existed to one degree or another. Money has always spoken.

Still, sure, fine: Despite the benefits, this does feel like a logistically unsustainable system. (For example, even if you like the current state of the portal, there is no guarantee the numbers keep going up. All it would take is a sudden and widespread booster pullback across the sport -- like, say, in the event of an economic recession, hmm -- for the hockey-stick upsides of current funding sources to halt.)

That is another reason 2025 has been so comedic: Players and agents can sense the end approaching. The scramble is on. After 2025-26, revenue-sharing will be introduced, giving programs a guaranteed pot of money to spend on player compensation across sports. Outside NIL deals will still be allowed, but they will have to be vetted through a Deloitte-run clearinghouse for contract sanity and market value. What those numbers will look like is anyone's guess, but the land-grab free-for-all of the current system will at least somewhat become a thing of the past.

And so 2025 was John Marston standing on his ranch, watching US agents drive an automobile up his road, realizing the west was about to become much less wild. Centralization, control, collective bargaining, athlete employment status: These are not far off now. The new frontier must be tamed.

When it is, though, another world will have been born. It will probably make a little more sense than this one. It will surely be less disordered. But it will also lack a certain poignant silliness that has made the 2025 portal so enjoyable. Baker-Mazara in the transfer portal! A 5-foot-10 shooting guard averaging 10 minutes a game on a Big Sky team asking around for $500,000! A.J. Storr transferring to his eighth program in eight years! For a few glorious years, and never more than this spring, college basketball players shrugged off years of systematic financial repression and finally realized their own value. More than their value, in many cases, and good for them. They dispensed with one goofy system and swerved gleefully into another.

It was crazy, wild, and oftentimes just plain dumb. It was also good. It was also funny as hell.