Jacob Tobman ’29 is a Government major from Brooklyn, New York. At The Flat Hat he is the sports editor. Outside of school you can often find him watching the Premier League on the weekend or catching a live basketball game back at home in New York City. You can contact him at jtobman@wm.edu.
The views expressed in the article are the author’s own.
The crowning of the Michigan Wolverines as the 2026 NCAA men’s basketball tournament champions, while marking the end of the game-playing season, also heralds the start of an entirely different beast: the transfer portal.
In the spring of 2025, over 2,000 Division I male basketball players entered the transfer portal, a number that almost certainly will be either met or surpassed in the coming weeks — and a number that already includes players from the College of William and Mary. In just the first days of the portal being open, the Tribe had already lost its top two scorers: guard Reese Miller ’27 and forward Tunde Vahlberg Fasasi ’27.
While discussions around the number of players, many of whom never find a new home, entering the transfer portal are necessary to have when evaluating the health of the sport as a whole, there is one specific transfer form that needs to be evaluated: the mid/low-major to high-major jump.
For the sake of this article, the high-major level will include the Atlantic Coast Conference, Big East Conference, Southeastern Conference, Big Ten Conference and Big 12 Conference. Yes, there are outliers (I see you, Gonzaga University, University of Memphis and friends), but this designation will help make the low/mid-major and high-major dichotomy easier to understand.
After the 2024-25 season, 14 of the 26 low/mid-major conference players-of-the-year decided to make this very jump, taking advantage of the chance to play at the highest level. Most importantly, the 14 programs who saw the backbone of their team leave at a moment’s notice received zero (!) financial compensation for their loss.
For some of these transfers, it worked very well — St. John’s guard Dylan Darling, who came to Queens from Idaho State, hit the game winning shot against the University of Kansas in the second round of this year’s tournament. For some of them, however, the word “flop” is the only applicable term. 2025 Atlantic Sun player of the year Jacob Ognacevic, who made the move from Lipscomb University to University of Washington, saw his per-game scoring drop from 20 to 3.1, and his minutes plummet from 33.8 to 12.5.
While these anecdotes are important, there is no value in trying to relitigate why these players decided to make the jump. Rather, let us not punish players who try to advance their careers, but instead reward the schools who trusted them and provided the platform to make the jump.
A trip across the pond provides worthy insights and anecdotes, and just maybe a possible solution to the drama and trauma surrounding transfers “up.”
In the summer of 2024, highly rated Chelsea FC youth winger Rio Ngumoha made the decision to leave Chelsea and switch to northeast powerhouse Liverpool FC. Ngumoha made the move following the expiration of his Chelsea contract, allowing Liverpool to move for him without paying the up-front fee to Chelsea that traditional player transfers entail.
It is not the move itself that holds importance (at least for this argument), as youth players around Europe move club to club all the time, but rather a report from The Athletic in February of this year that Liverpool would indeed have to pay at least £2.8 million to Chelsea in the form of “training and development” compensation.
With our short excursion across the pond complete, let us leave Chelsea, Liverpool and Ngumoha but take the idea of “training and development” compensation with us back home.
When FIFA implemented this form of compensation, the goal was to reward clubs (especially smaller clubs) for the work they do developing youth players. So, while Liverpool and Chelsea are both massive clubs, the application of such reforms in U.S. college basketball would make even more sense.
In an era where high-major programs are backed by billionaire entrepreneurs and multi-national corporations (yes, I’m looking at you, Tyson Chicken), and teams are fielding $22 million rosters (now I am looking at you, University of Kentucky), fixed payments to mid- and low-major programs could go a long way in ensuring high-level competition up and down the college basketball pyramid.
The implementation would undoubtedly be messy, especially given the NCAA’s propensity to make even positive reforms harder than necessary, but it would carry many benefits.
For one, these payments would allow mid- and low-major programs to reinvest in their own teams, while also keeping coaches from feeling that they need to also find a new school to have any chance of consistently competing.
The implementation of training and development compensation could also help attract new donors to low- and mid-major programs, who would see an already-existing pool of money available to teams that they could then contribute to, rather than having to create entire Name, Image and Likeness funds on their own. Donors typically don’t like to be among the first, or alone.
The College’s basketball team has also dealt with its own experience of star players leaving to pursue opportunities at the high-major level. After the 2020-21 season, star guard Luke Loewe, who had averaged 16.2 points per game, left for Big Ten outfit University of Minnesota. Going back a bit deeper into the archives, after the 2018-19 season, the Tribe lost its second leading scorer Justin Pierce to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Even though hindsight is 20/20, the case of the College can still be a valuable thought experiment. If the Tribe had received compensation from Minnesota and UNC, how could its rosters have shaped up in the following year? I cannot go back in time, but perhaps a 5-27 season, like what happened in the year after Loewe’s departure, could have been avoided.
The idea of money distribution down the college basketball pyramid might come across to some as some wonky 21st-century socialist and sports collaboration, but the fact is that the money taking over college basketball is not leaving any time soon. Instead, working within this now money-flushed system could, and should, bring incentives for team No. 1 all the way to No. 361.
