Column: Wake me up when September ends
April transfers decimated rosters across New Jersey. I take stock of where things stand as I wrap up Season 3 of Guarden State.
Check on the Seton Hall fans in your life. This month could not have been easy for them.
It’s been a minute since I last wrote something in this space, and in that time the transfer portal has ballooned to record numbers of players. The website Verbal Commits does a terrific job of tracking transfers, and as of Tuesday morning its database listed 1,908 transfers this cycle, nearly two grand more than the 1,718 who entered last offseason. Across the 362 schools in Division I, that’s 5.27 transfers per team.
The spike shouldn’t come as a surprise, but knowing that a chunk of my audience follows the sport only casually, I’m happy to break down what’s happened.
There was a time in the not-so-distant past that college athletes had almost no freedom to move from school to school. Your head coach could bolt for a better contract, but if you wanted to then find a new school, the NCAA would make you sit out for a season. Conferences often had rules allowing a school to block players from transferring somewhere in the same league.
A movement toward athletes’ rights in recent years has improved their conditions. They were allowed one transfer with immediate eligibility – plus a “free” transfer if a head coach left or there was a documented family hardship. Otherwise, two-time transfers were subject to a waiver process to play right away.
Over the winter, a court granted an injunction to give multiple-transfer guys the ability to compete right away. The NCAA backed off and no longer enforces any regulations on that front. But coupled with the rise of NIL collectives, this has created a worse version of professional sports free agency. It’s free agency without contracts, where every player is allowed – and motivated – to hop from school to school every year.
Those motivations are numerous. Think you can make better money at another school? Transfer. Unhappy in your role with your current team? Transfer. Your school just added a transfer at your position, potentially threatening your playing time? Transfer.
It isn’t carrying water for multimillionaire coaches for us to say that this is unsustainable for the sport.
When athletes were finally given the right to profit off their names, images and likenesses in 2021, the common understanding was that they could do brand deals, appearances and autograph signings for money – something they should have been able to do the whole time. But the current-day critique that NIL has ushered in a pay-for-play system is completely fair.
Take Seton Hall, a smaller, private, Catholic university without deep coffers for paying players. I wasn’t surprised that Kadary Richmond finally entered the portal last week, but the Pirates – fresh off winning the NIT – have now lost nine players to transfer. Guys like Elijah Hutchins-Everett, an Orange native who could have started at center for his hometown team next year. Guys like Jaquan Sanders and Malachi Brown, backups whose roles were about to increase as well.
This has trickled down to places previously untouched by transfer drama. Using Verbal Commits’ database, I checked the eight Ivy League teams and found three instances of underclassmen transferring out last year. (Grad transfers are another story, since Ivy League rules prohibit graduate students from competing in sports.) And that’s a generous three, because it counts Jordan Dingle, who was basically a grad transfer to St. John’s but had taken a year off at Penn during COVID, and Garrett Johnson, who left Princeton to get treatment for a benign tumor and ultimately started fresh at George Washington.
This year, no fewer than 10 Ivy League underclassmen entered the portal (counting Brown star Nana Owusu-Anane, who later decided to withdraw). Princeton alone lost Jack Scott, Vernon Collins, Derek Sangster and Ryan Duncan. The Tigers were spared from the possibility of Xaivian Lee or Caden Pierce being poached, but budding Harvard star Malik Mack is now at Georgetown and Yale big man Danny Wolf is at Michigan.
Saint Peter’s lost Corey Washington and Michael Houge, huge pieces of their MAAC title team. Monmouth had Nikita Konstantynovskyi for one year before he re-entered the portal. FDU lost Ansley Almonor, Sean Moore and Joe Munden Jr. These mid-major and low-major programs now have an even harder time retaining and building teams for the long run.
As a high-major coach told Fox’s John Fanta, the blame shouldn’t lie at the feet of the athletes. If money is in play, you can’t fault them for chasing it – most of them will not play professionally. But the free-for-all is killing coaches, turning off fans and harming the sport on the whole.
“We can’t do this every single year,” the coach concluded. “Kids should make big dollars. But the way this is set up right now with no contracts or regulations makes it impossible to sustain anything in this sport.”
(By the way, it’s also not a newspaper reporter’s fault that a kid announced he’d play for New Mexico, then took a better offer from Wisconsin. Some donkeys apparently need to be told this.)
I write this newsletter part-time, even during the season, so the prospect of following portal movement minute by minute is a turn-off. I was on board early, but just look back at what I wrote about Seton Hall on April 5. Now that about 75% of last year’s team is gone, does a word of it still hold up three weeks later?
So we end the third season of Guarden State with something of a thud. My offseason plans are TBD, but they are sure to involve some vacation time and a lot less social media. There will be stories worth checking in on over the summer, and I hope to do so, here or in another publication. Other than that, it’s time for me to close up shop until someone finally finds the portal’s off switch.
I’m proud of the work I poured into Guarden State this season. Increasing my output from two to three newsletters a week helped me hit new subscriber milestones and reach new audiences. I finally crossed Run Baby Run Arena off my bucket list and covered games at all eight D1 schools in New Jersey. I also had a few plans that didn’t work out for reasons beyond my control. That plus the relentless portal churn confirmed for me that this newsletter is an October-through-April pursuit. Wake me up when September ends.
Take a look back through the 2023-24 season through this selection of previous editions of Guarden State: