The NCAA basketball transfer portal opened on March 24 with a record 700-plus players jumping ship from their original programs in just the first day.
Now with over a thousand looking for new homes in the first week, the landscape of the sport will be drastically different entering the 2025-26 campaign.
Many will attribute that drastic change to the new era of NIL payments and the impending revenue-sharing system that would allow schools to pay student-athletes directly.
Those may have enhanced the evolution of the game but one factor has remained constant in the desire of players to compete elsewhere: Head coaching changes.
Since the start of the NCAA Tournament, nine head coaches of teams that qualified (and were eliminated) have departed for opportunities elsewhere in the sport.
Four of those departures, coincidentally, were to fill vacancies left by coaches who participated in March Madness.
UC San Diego’s Eric Olen was hired to replace New Mexico’s Richard Pitino, who left to take the job at Xavier which was vacated by Sean Miller who will now lead Texas.
Separately, Bryant’s Phil Martelli Jr. will fill the hole left at VCU by Ryan Odom who was hired to head up Virginia’s program.
That’s going to cause a mass migration of prospects, past and future, to shift their allegiances to follow the coach who recruited them.
Subsequently, that’s going to alter the quality of teams in multiple conferences and influence championships in 2025.
This year’s NCAA Tournament has been one of the chalkiest in recent memory. There were only 11 upsets ahead of the Elite Eight, the least in tournament history to that point, per the CBS broadcast on Sunday. If all four No. 1 seeds qualify for the Final Four, it would be just the second time ever and the first since 2008.
Fans can expect more of the same as the situation develops unchecked.
The player transfer portal is by far the biggest disturbance to the college athletics system but coaching changes may be the most under-recognized cause.
