College basketball attracts millions of fans every year due to its electric atmospheres, unpredictability during March Madness, and the strong sense of pride and community it brings to each team’s fans.
In recent years, however, college basketball has become significantly worse due to the extensive growth of the NCAA Transfer Portal. The portal is an online platform that allows college athletes to declare their intent to transfer. Once in the portal, athletes’ information becomes available to coaches, allowing them to be recruited by other programs.
The portal launched on October 15, 2018, to allow student-athletes to transfer but with the consequence of having to sit out a year. Regulations were created in 2021 that made it possible for athletes to transfer once without sitting out a year. These regulations continued until 2024 when the NCAA allowed athletes to have unlimited transfers.
The portal is a semi-controversial issue in regards to college basketball, often dividing fans because of where they stand concerning the portal and its regulations. An MHS Media poll found 41.9% of Marist students believe that the transfer portal has somewhat improved the overall quality of the college basketball experience.
Many people are also not well informed about the portal, causing people to be unaware about its negative effects. In fact, 33.3% of students said they were “very familiar” with the NCAA Transfer Portal while a majority of students were “generally uninformed” about it.
While the portal may seem fine, it is not all sunshine and rainbows. It has caused significant damage to college coaches, players, and even the fans.
A huge part of building a college basketball team is the fact that coaches get to go to high schools across the nation in order to find recruits. Coaches find these kids in hopes that they will attend their school and remain at their school until their eligibility is expired.
Now, due to the transfer portal, coaches can no longer give their full attention to recruiting players because they have to worry about what players of theirs are coming and going.
This also causes issues for the players of said teams. Players have almost completely lost all sense of loyalty to their team and teammates. They often feel less inclined to form bonds with their teammates because they know that they can transfer at will and go to whatever school they think has the highest chances of winning.
While it may seem justified, transferring based on the slight chance of winning a national championship defeats the entire purpose of growing and working with your team to succeed.
The final issue with the transfer portal is the difficulties that it brings for the fans. When people become avid watchers of certain teams, they often have players that are their favorite.
The downside of said support is that when these players end up transferring from school to school, their fans have a hard time keeping up with them. Fans often have to make the choice of whether they want to follow their favorite team or their favorite player.
Fans would not have to make this choice if college players developed even the slightest bit of team loyalty and realized that the grass is not always greener on the other side.
In order to solve this problem, the NCAA should impose stricter limits on those who use the transfer portal. These could include limits on how many times a player can transfer or whether or not they should sit out a year after transferring. The majority, 68.2% of Marist students agree with this statement that transferring should be allowed, just with more regulations.
College basketball is becoming less enjoyable every day and if the NCAA does not do something to stop this, it will lose its most valuable assets: the fans.
