The double-edged new normal in college athletics today is the transfer portal and NIL (name, image and likeness). Since it was introduced in 2019, the number of men’s and women’s basketball players in the portal has increased each year from hundreds in 2019 to thousands in 2025. College football transfers also are up.
According to On3, which tracks portal comings and goings, over 40% of MBB players (5,607) and about 29% of WBB players (5,048) went into the 30-day portal window, which opened during March Madness and closed in late April.
In other words, the transfer portal along with NIL basically have become college sport’s free agency. Players come and go for various reasons and not always about playing time or lack thereof.
AD Advisors, a group of former college administrators, recently produced two “white papers” on the transfer portal by collecting quantitative data through interviews with coaches, administrators, athletic directors, and players for their first-hand experiences. The group also studied over 800 FBS (Football Bowl Subdivision) football players dating back to 2020-21 and over 14,000 basketball players in the portal dating back to 2019.
The respective studies found that “a significant majority” of football student-athletes and basketball players who entered the portal transferred down from a Power 5 school to a non-Power 5 school, or transferred down from other conferences or did not get picked by a new school.
Furthermore, both the portal and NIL are strange bedfellows of sorts, putting more pressure on coaches to succeed. An April 16 article in Minnesota Sports Fan pointed out that NIL ultimately did in former Minnesota coach Ben Johnson, who was fired in March after four seasons.
“When Ben was hired back in 2021,” the article said, “the wide-open NCAA transfer portal was still a very new thing. So was NIL. Every year under Johnson, they ran into the same problem — not enough NIL money. Instead of improving the core of their team in the offseason, Ben and his coaches had to find underdeveloped talent in the transfer portal and use it to cobble together an underwhelming roster.
“They’d lose their best players. This is why Ben Johnson was fired,” the article said.
Kennedy D. Wells, the CEO of Achieving Coaching Excellence, told the MSR that coaches must become equally as adept at transfer portal and NIL matters as they are with the X’s and O’s.
“Black coaches specifically, and it’s not to say that they’re not,” stressed Wells, “but they need to fully embrace and immerse themselves in what is transpiring with intercollegiate athletics.
“It is important that these coaches…understand that becoming a CEO is no longer an option. It is a must when it comes to how you go about navigating your specific program. It’s important that you be proactive about asking questions of the administrators and make sure that they have dotted all the I’s and crossed all the T’s to give you the best possible opportunity to be successful.”
The last-hired-first-fired axiom that has existed for Black coaches seemingly forever is putting Black coaches on hot seats quicker than usual. “The standard now is that you should be able to improve drastically from season to season,” said Wells.
“For those that know a little bit about the coaching profession, it’s very difficult to build chemistry and things like that, which are so vital to the success of any entity let alone a women’s or men’s basketball program.
“I think it’s not a matter of [Black coaches] having to work twice as hard to be half as good,” concluded Wells. “I think everybody’s working hard, especially in the college basketball landscape. Everybody’s working hard.”
Charles Hallman welcomes reader comments to challman@spokesman-recorder.com.