March Madness or Transfer Portal Showcase? The New Reality of College Basketball

In the good ol’ days, March Madness meant focusing on the games, enjoying the Cinderella stories, tracking your brackets and dreaming that your team might be the one showered with confetti on the first Monday in April as “One Shining Moment” plays.

In this NIL portal era, all of that still applies — but March Madness has morphed into just as much of a scouting mission as a bid for a national championship.

As mid-major and low-major conference tournaments unfold this week across the country — the first NCAA Tournament bid gets doled out Saturday night to the winner of the Ohio Valley Conference title game — power conference fans get to salivate over potential portal acquisitions.

Meanwhile, power conference coaching staffs will be finalizing their additions to 2026-27 rosters. Yes, finalizing.

While the portal doesn’t open officially until April 7, it’s naïve to believe that highly paid consulting firms haven’t been sending targeted lists of suitable prospects to big-time head coaches who, in turn, have instructed their general managers to negotiate with agents to determine how much $$$ it will take to land their prized clients.

Yeah, that’s modern college basketball.

But enough about how things have changed so starkly over the last few years. Which sharpshooters should everyone be dreaming on?

How about Bellarmine junior forward Jack Karasinski, who’s averaging 21.3 points, shooting 42.6% from 3-point range and getting to the line more than six times per game? The only player in America who’s a more efficient go-to guy than Karasinski (according to KenPom) is Duke’s Cameron Boozer, who’ll win all the National Player of the Year awards.

Or maybe UNLV’s Dra Gibbs-Lawhorn, the former Illinois guard who has averaged 29.7 points over the last nine games while hitting an absurd 45 of 85 from 3-point range? He’s an athletic freak, too, albeit 6-foot-1.

Perhaps Buffalo sophomore guard Daniel Freitag, a four-star prospect who did little as a freshman at Wisconsin but has restored his career arc by averaging 19.8 points, 4.3 rebounds and 3.8 assists for the Bulls?

They are among the many fine ideas out there, but everybody — coaches, fans, the transfers themselves — should go into this process with their eyes wide open.

Based on an unofficial study conducted just now looking at every player who averaged at least 17 points per game last season, there are a lot more misses than hits when low- and mid-majors make the jump to the big time.

(Yes, picking 17 points per game while ignoring other key stats is arbitrary, but coaches are always looking for scorers, hence this decision.)

Anyway, back to this extremely scientific study. There were 118 Division I players who averaged at least 17 points last season. Fifty-five guys either ran out of eligibility or turned pro early.

Fifteen guys — including such studs as Texas Tech’s JT Toppin, Ohio State’s Bruce Thornton, Purdue’s Trey Kaufman-Renn and Mississippi State’s Josh Hubbard — stayed where they were.

That left us 48 who changed schools. Ignoring high-major guys who jumped to other high majors — fellas like PJ Haggerty (Memphis to Kansas State), Jason Edwards (Vandy to Providence) and Keyshawn Hall (UCF to Auburn) — it becomes clear that it’s rarely roses for the players who climb a notch or two to the big time.

For each Lamar Wilkerson, who went from averaging 20.5 points at Sam Houston State to 21.3 at Indiana and meriting all-Big Ten honors, there are four guys like Bucknell’s Noah Williamson (Alabama), Southern Illinois’ Ali Dibba (Texas A&M), Northeastern’s Rashad King (LSU) and Kansas City’s Jamar Brown (UCLA) who were relegated to bench roles at their new schools.

If they believed they would get similar minutes and shots at their new place, then that’s a bummer.

But, hey, as Mad Men’s Don Draper once screamed at underling Peggy Olson, “That’s what the money is for!”