An epidemic has spread across college basketball.
Since March 24, over 2,100 Division I men’s players have entered their names into the National Collegiate Athletic Association transfer portal. Created in 2018, the portal streamlines the process of transferring between schools. It continues to gain popularity in 2025: the average DI men’s program has suffered roughly 5.7 portal departures over the last month.
The portal process has been described by many in the industry as lawless and anarchic, an unregulated system of free agency with no long-term contracts.
“It’s truly kind of a one-year contract type of thing,” Jim Root, a college basketball journalist and a transfer portal analyst at The Athletic, told The Flat Hat. “A guy is there, and you’ve got to make sure you give him ample reason to stay, both rotationally and emotionally, but especially financially. Otherwise, people are just going to hop around and play at four schools in four years.”
The portal has an outsized effect on mid-major conferences, where teams typically don’t have the money or resources to fend off the bigger-name schools that raid their rosters for talent. According to Root, roughly 70 to 80% of elite mid-major players enter the portal after every season.
“It’s definitely something that mid-major coaches lament repeatedly,” Root said. “That ‘I invest in the guy. He probably wasn’t a big recruit, he develops into an All-Star or All-Conference player, and before his season’s even done, he’s probably got an agent that’s either contacting schools or being contacted by schools.’”
The Coastal Athletic Association is one of the league’s conferences most affected by portal drain. 13 of last season’s 15 CAA All-Conference honorees will don different uniforms in 2025-2026. But it’s not just the CAA’s stars fleeing the league: Elon, for example, rostered just one All-Conference selection during the 2024-2025 season but suffered a CAA-high nine transfer departures.
Even the CAA’s elite teams aren’t immune to portal drain. Charleston has won 13 or more conference games for three straight years and has reached the NCAA Tournament in two of the last three seasons. Nonetheless, a total of eight Cougars players who accounted for a combined 86.47% of the team’s 2024-2025 scoring output recently decided to enter their names into the portal.
In this era of discontinuity, what is the most effective way for the College of William and Mary and its peers to approach roster-building? Root said that, during his time tracking the portal, he has found the answer to be star retention.
The CAA’s most successful program of the post-COVID era has been Towson, which has won a league-best 75% of its conference games over the last four years and has claimed two CAA titles during the same time frame. By no coincidence, the Tigers retain their elite players at an astounding rate. Since the 2020-2021 season, just one Towson All-CAA honoree has elected to transfer: guard Nick Timberlake, who only departed after playing five seasons for the Tigers.
Towson will again bring back most of its key pieces next season. Just three of its players are currently in the portal, the fewest of any CAA team. Further, All-Conference sophomore guards Tyler Tejada and Dylan Williamson recently announced their intentions to return to the Tigers in the fall. The backcourt duo will become the only 2024-2025 All-CAA honorees to remain with the program they played for last season.
However, star retention is a pipe dream for most teams, as it is difficult for mid-majors to manufacture environments that will convince their best players to spurn bigger paydays. According to Root, non-monetary factors that contribute to retention are hard to pin down and can range from a coach’s likability to a school’s academic reputation.
“You never know exactly what the pie chart of reasoning is,” Root said. “Is it because they have a little more money than some of their mid-major counterparts? Is it that the coach is really good at creating relationships with his players? I think there is something to that. Some coaches are more comfortable saying, ‘Alright, I can turn it over. Hired guns. Let’s bring them in. I’ll make it work.’ But for some, [relationships and retention] mean a little more.”
“I would say there’s probably a few programs that are good about it consistently,” Root continued. “That can kind of go back to the coach, or can go back to money, or just if a guy feels comfortable in the team’s style, if it’s fun to play, that can be part of it. You’ve also got the Patriot League and the Ivy League. They’re basically in their own world, because academics are so big there. They retain way, way better than any other conference, consistently year over year, even in this era.”
Root considers Towson to be an outlier that can overcome financial disadvantages with intangible elements that aren’t easy for other programs to replicate. In the majority of cases, he said, mid-major stars will go where they can earn the most money.
“If it’s going to be a limited earning period for somebody in college where they’re worth this much for only four or five years, unfortunately, it’s hard to ask [players] not to maximize that,” Root said.
Although retention is the most reliable way to maintain competitive rosters, some CAA teams have managed to find consistent success without it. The conference’s second and third-winningest programs since 2020 are Charleston and North Carolina Wilmington, respectively; the former has the lowest player retention rate in the conference, while the latter retains players at a middling rate.
UNCW has primarily combated this issue by identifying and importing overlooked Division I transfers, shifting its playstyle to match its personnel and developing homegrown talent of its own. During the 2024-2025 season, which culminated in a UNCW victory at the CAA tournament, the Seahawks were led by graduate student guard Donovan Newby (a former University of Milwaukee-Wisconsin-Milwaukee transfer), junior forward Harlan Obioha (a Niagara University transfer) and senior forward Khamari McGriff, a career-long Seahawk.
“[UNCW coach Takayo] Siddle has done a really good job of building with D1 transfers, of finding the diamond-in-the-rough type guys,” said Root. “Donovan Newby was okay at Milwaukee, and then last year, he’s the floor general and huge leader for a team that goes to the NCAA Tournament.”
“I also think he’s been really flexible style-wise,” Root said. “He learned and coached under [former UNCW coach Kevin] Keatts when they were in a four-guard, four-out, ball-screen, hit the roll man and have a ton of spacing system. Then last year, UNCW was top ten in the country in post-up rate, playing through Obioha a ton, McGriff a ton. They were like, ‘We’ve got bigs that are bigger and better than most of the CAA, so let’s take advantage of that.’ That’s, I think, a point for him, the stylistic flexibility and tweaking his approach to the kind of players he’s able to get.”
Charleston, on the other hand, consistently attracts DI transfers, but it can also attribute a large part of its success to players from under-the-radar sources like Division II and Division III schools and the international talent pool. Of the Cougars’ 19 All-CAA selections since the 2020-2021 season, 11 came from one of the aforementioned sources.
Although Charleston leaned more on DI transfers during the 2024-2025 campaign, Ante Brzovic, a former DII Southeastern Oklahoma State transfer, and freshman guard Justas Stonkus, a Lithuanian national, were two of the Cougars’ top players.
What strategy does the College, a school with higher academic standards and fewer resources than the CAA’s elite teams, pursue?
The answer falls somewhere between the UNCW and Charleston models. The Tribe’s blueprint has slightly changed since current head coach Brian Earl took over from former head coach Dane Fischer before the 2024-2025 season. Since his arrival, Earl has retained players and added DI transfers at roughly the same rate as Fischer, but he’s focused less on recruiting freshmen and more on recruiting junior college and non-D1 transfers.
Earl’s openness to junior college transfers is a particularly new development, as before his arrival, the Tribe had not taken one since 2005.
In his time tracking the portal, Root said he found money and talent win out in most mid-major level cases , but every school can find success with the right combination of coaches, players and scheme, even if it can’t retain like Towson or attract the same quality of transfers as Charleston or UNCW.
In Root’s opinion, Earl, who coached at Cornell from 2016 to 2024 before coming to the College, is qualified to overcome the Tribe’s disadvantages and build a winning team in Williamsburg.
“I think the William and Mary administration was really smart hiring a guy from the Ivy who has been familiar with how you have to build within an academic framework,” Root said. “That’s smart. I think he also plays a really fun style, and he brought it from Cornell, and perhaps that helps keep guys around. You’re going to get minutes, there’s going to be shots to go around. It’s not like we’re only going to play 60 possessions and one guy will take 10 shots all game. There’ll be possessions. The ball will be pinging around. I think that’s smart to approach it that way.”
Root particularly praised Earl’s openness to taking non-D1 and junior college players.
“It’s tough with high academics to pull from certain schools,” Root said. “If you’ve got a good DII pipeline and you can find some of the high academic achievers at that level, pull them up and try to make it work at DI, that makes a lot of sense to me.”
The Tribe won 17 games in Earl’s first season, its highest mark since 2019-2020. Even though the College isn’t Towson, Charleston or UNCW, Root believes that the Green and Gold has identified a roster-building strategy that can keep it afloat in the wild college basketball landscape.
