The transfer portal is finally fun

Being (slightly less) bewildered never felt so good

Whether you immediately loathed the idea of men’s college basketball players transferring freely for money, or whether you were always enthusiastic about the concept — and there were dozens of us! — there was one thing pretty much every college basketball fan could always agree on:

It was, and remains, totally bewildering.

For decades, rosters were built in fundamentally the same way. Rare changes were always mild: gradually fewer destination restrictions, arcane graduate-transfer eligibility allowances, more players willing to just sit out a year anyway, a handful of bluebloods hoarding one-and-done lottery picks. The overall direction of travel was always the same. Coaches would spend years obsessing over thousands of high school prospects. They’d sign two or three or four of those prospects. (Occasionally, if not often, with the involvement of a paper bag.) Then they’d lay out their development programs, plan for multi-year scholarship timelines, and assume this ancient incentive structure — if you leave, you have to sit, tsk-tsk — would discourage defections.

Now all that is gone. In the past five years there have been, at last unofficial count, five gazillion words lamenting The Way Things Are Now. Yet despite all the wailing, we maybe still haven’t totally reckoned with just how epochal this revolution has been. Everything is different now. Everything keeps getting more different. Anyone who grew up watching a fundamentally different thing — even those who thought changes were necessary and good — has undergone a totally exhausting, brain-melting degree of cultural change. It’s been insane.

Which is maybe why I have, the past couple springs, found myself mostly uninterested in the day-to-day mechanics of the portal. I guess I was overwhelmed.

With thousands of players moving in all directions — and with so many of them entering during the NCAA Tournament, when all I want to do is think about the freaking NCAA Tournament, thanks — there were too many 300-word newsers, too many overhyped posts about 17.3 points-per-game-averaging MAAC guards, too much “has narrowed his final list to,” too unwieldy a volume of campus visits, too inexhaustible a glut of “with that being said.” It was like trying to catch dust.

I love this game. I think the product on the floor is better and more entertaining than ever. I think the portal is both a moral and competitive good. But the process itself has never been actively enjoyable. It was a firehose of information overload, and every individual piece of information was half-formed, isolated, context-free. In the moment, what sense could you make of any of it? It’s not like you could start analyzing teams. You could barely analyze team needs. You had no idea how much money programs had to spend, or which coaches were actually offering which players what, or how many shoes were left to drop or when. Better, then, to check out, circle back in mid-summer, let the dust settle.

All of which I’d been thinking about last week, as I left Indianapolis and joined my family on spring break, and in the days since. At some point along the way, as I found myself unwittingly eager to follow each bit of transfer news, and then happily dig in to the player afterward, it dawned on me:

This doesn’t feel so weird now. I feel like I know what’s going on. Also: I’m enjoying this? I’m enjoying this. This is getting fun.

Why? Why now? There are a few things going on here (above and beyond all of the positives I’ve been going on about since 2021).

1. It opened after the tournament ended

Just an obvious, perfect change. Clear delineation. Needs no further explanation. It’s so much better.

2. The information environment is now keeping up

This is the biggest improvement by far. In the early days, there were very few centralized places to find comprehensive transfer portal information. You absorbed it mostly ephemerally. VerbalCommits was the only big fat list of every player in the portal, with their previous team and the destination (if applicable) and it was — respectfully, pre-redesign — not exactly the pinnacle of data readability. (You just had to Ctrl-F your way around. It wasn’t the end of the world.) Editorially driven rankings, with blurbs and the whole nine, were usually simple and counting stats-obsessed.

Look at us now. Beyond the reporters doing the usual (great) newsbreaking work, Trilly chief among them, there are incredible options for deeper context and analysis. Bart Torvik maintains not one but two massive databases of transfer players — one for players who have committed and one for guys still in the portal — ranked according to his own advanced stats. You can subscribe to Jim Root’s regularly updated Google Sheet as he tracks and fills out every roster in the country. You can read extremely detailed tactics- and fit-oriented deep dives on every significant transfer, as they happen, from our buddies at Basket Under Review. The Athletic guys are doing high-level player rankings, tinged with Sam Vecenie’s scouting perspective. There’s a ton more besides.

And then there’s Evan Miyakawa. Evan’s own portal rankings — based on his BPR metric, which includes a defensive performance component most models don’t account for — are about as useful as you’ll find. But Evan’s work behind the scenes really fascinates me. Last summer, Evan launched the Front Office Suite, a tool programs can use to input NIL values they’re hearing in the market, even ephemerally. The estimates go in, they bump into Evan’s metrics, and coaches can get a sense of not only what players are good but where value can be had.

As Evan laid out Tuesday, this data is already allowing him to form meaningful about the 2026 portal, namely that — as expected — big guys are getting wildly overpaid:

By looking at players across positions who are expected to have similar value next year according to our player projections, we can compare their actual going rates to determine market demand. … Centers are being the most overpaid, costing about 30% more than they should on average, while point guards are more of a bargain. … [To] obtain a center or a point guard who are equivalent in talent level, it would cost $1.3 million for the center, while only $813,000 for the point guard. That means, in this market, it costs 61% more NIL dollars to get a center of the same caliber as a point guard.

Evan’s data also showed that the total pool of money in the market is still growing rapidly:

There are about 30 teams that use the Front Office Suite, spanning 12 conferences in the high-major and mid-major ranks. By summarizing the NIL player data entered across all teams and comparing it to last year’s market data, we can gain a pretty good understanding of how the NIL market has changed over the past year.

As mentioned at the top, the NIL market for Division 1 players is up about 65% from last year. That means that a player good enough to be valued at $1 million last offseason would be getting around $1.65 million this offseason. It’s pretty hard to fathom how market rates have increased this much, especially since we saw a similar increase from 2024 to 2025, if not even higher.

The market is up even higher for players coming from high-major programs: There has been a 73% increase in the going rate for players on power conference teams. The market increase for players from low- and mid-major conferences is slightly lower, up 44% from last offseason.

Reminder: We’re one week in to the 2026 portal. This is incredibly useful information! (Evan is a very smart dude.) It is bound to inform a ton of the analysis that happens in the next weeks and months, and may already be impacting the way coaches are considering roster builds. (Maybe go back four-out? Mid-2010s smallball?!)

But the most exciting thing about Evan’s info is that it feels like the first fleeting glimpse of a new world altogether. Maybe eventually we'll actually know what guys are getting paid and what teams have to spend. So much of the confusion and messiness of this time of year — the complete opacity of offers, counteroffers, agent talk and budgets — could one day become fully transparent. The possibilities for value-based analysis beyond player role and team fit would explode.

That journey has just begun. But we’re already light years from where we started.

3. Programs (and players) keep getting smarter

To wit: P.J. Haggerty.