It’s becoming an annual rite of passage in college basketball. As the transfer portal opens amid the NCAA Tournament, consternation abounds over how different — and perhaps not for the better — college basketball is now than it was a decade ago.
Transfers accounted for more than half of the scoring in the NCAA Tournament through two rounds, and 11 of the Sweet 16 are led in scoring by transfers. But for a pair of Big Ten teams among those still standing, the formula for sustained success doesn’t look much different than it did in the sport’s bygone era.
All five starters for Purdue began their careers at Purdue, and four of Michigan State’s starters have never played for anyone except the Spartans. And if you think legendary Michigan State coach Tom Izzo is going to be dividing his time between his 2024-25 team and assembling his 2025-26 roster, think again.
As the No. 2 seed Spartans prepare for Friday night’s Sweet 16 battle with No. 6 seed Ole Miss, you won’t catch Izzo peeping into the portal, where more than 1,000 players are already on the hunt for new spots.
“I’m going to worry today about the guys I got in this program who have done an incredible job this year, and that’s it,” Izzo said this week. “If that costs me later, so be it. But Tom Izzo isn’t cheating the people that he has who have been loyal to him for this chaos that’s going on out there.”
Michigan State’s 2024 portal class ranked No. 106 nationally, per 247Sports, and featured just two three-star transfers. While they’ve factored into the rotation, the key addition that propelled the Spartans to a Big Ten title and No. 2 seed in the Big Dance wasn’t a portal prize. Rather, it was a four-star freshman, Jase Richardson, who has teamed up with a deep group of returning players to give Izzo his beat team since 2019.
With his squad two victories away from reaching its first Final Four since 2019, Izzo — now in Year 30 with the Spartans — views the perceived obligation head coaches in the postseason face to split time between the present and the future as a myth.
“These guys that gave me everything they could give me are going to have a chance, and I’m not going to screw it up by spending any time on other stuff,” he said. “I don’t sleep right now. So why in the hell would I do something else that might benefit me a year from now?…Waste of time.”
For those still clinging to the old-fashioned tenants of high school recruiting, player development and loyalty, Izzo’s approach is refreshing, and it’s undeniably been effective this season.
College basketball fans concerned about graduation rates in the mass-transfer era may also appreciate secret sauce at Purdue, where coach Matt Painter points out that there have been just two incoming transfers in the past four years.
“Probably the fact that we’ve been able to keep guys sometimes kind of blows your mind because it’s hard, right, if you have 13 guys on scholarship, to keep everybody happy,” Painter said. “But education has as been a part of our equation. So I think when guys maybe don’t play as much or don’t start or get their minutes or whatever, you really gotta think, ‘I’m going to transfer and go somewhere else and not get a degree at Purdue’.”
Painter pointed out that two transfers the Boilermakers lost after last season’s run to the national title game — Mason Gillis and Ethan Morton — had both graduated. Gillis received two degrees from Purdue before leaving for Duke, and Morton also completed graduate work before heading to Colorado State.
“It will be interesting to see where we go from here, though, because there’s no doubt that we’re going to use the portal,” Painter said. “We’re probably just not going to use it as much as everybody else.”
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