NORTH AUGUSTA, S.C. — There is no question the combination of endless free agency in the transfer portal and a glut of available super seniors significantly have diminished the value of high school recruits during the past few years of college basketball. But that bonus year of eligibility, granted for anyone affected by the disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, is going away after this season.
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Essentially, there will be a double senior class in the spring, as typical seniors and super seniors will be purged from rosters. High school recruiting, then, figures to reclaim some of its previous importance.
“Simply put: It’s kind of math, right?” Florida coach Todd Golden said last weekend at Nike’s Peach Jam, the biggest recruiting event of the year. “We’re losing 20 percent of the portal, so programs will start dipping back more into the high school ranks. You always want to stay old if you can, but it’s just a supply-and-demand deal. For the last few years, there’s just been so many good older players out there, and now there won’t be as many.”
College coaches surveyed at Peach Jam agreed there will be some uptick in prioritizing high school prospects. They were split on just how much.
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“Slightly,” Creighton coach Greg McDermott said. “But I still think people will try to stay old the best they can.”
“A little bit more important but not significantly more important,” Alabama coach Nate Oats said. “Because I still think if you can get an older guy, even if he’s not a fifth-year guy, that’s so valuable. Mark Sears last year was in his fourth year, not fifth, and he started his career at a mid-major, and he was an All-American for us.”
Xavier coach Sean Miller believes freshmen will become more attractive, in part because the age and experience gap won’t be quite so wide without super seniors across the sport.
“If you recruit a high school player now, you just have to have a place and a role for him,” Miller said. “It has to be understood: You have the opportunity to compete and play a lot or you’re coming here to be more developmental. Because if that isn’t clear, he’ll leave.”
Kentucky’s Mark Pope isn’t so sure high school recruiting is making a comeback — because he isn’t sure it ever left.
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“Look around,” he said, pointing to every significant coach in the sport seated courtside at Peach Jam. “We’re all still here, everybody still recruiting, still totally dug in on these players. But it does feel like maybe the second or third or fourth tier of players have been getting hurt the most. With this fifth year gone, it tightens up the availability of (veteran transfers) and maybe creates some more opportunities for those kinds of recruits.”
Connecticut’s Dan Hurley, who reasonably can be deemed a roster-construction expert, agrees portal “inventory” is about to take a huge hit and make high school players more important, but he cautions against any philosophy that is too heavy in either direction.
“You gotta have a balance,” Hurley said. “You gotta recruit impact freshmen and developmental freshmen and then supplement that with the portal. You gotta have a blend.”
Back-to-back buzz is already gone for Hurley — but not bragging rights
Even in a gymnasium packed with fans and a who’s who of college basketball coaches, it’s easy to spot Hurley and his backward baseball cap. He sat front row, center court, for every coveted prospect’s games last weekend at Peach Jam, and his folding chair might as well have been a throne. For the second straight summer, he strutted into this event as the king of his sport, the reigning champ.
As one might expect, though, he already has come down off the high of winning again.
“Obviously, a lot of people are patting you on your back, but you’re just locked in on winning again,” Hurley said. “Because it fades fast, man. This one faded faster than the first. It’s gone.”
Even before Hurley won a second straight NCAA title in April, he said the thrill of the chase was more fulfilling than accomplishing the dream. Now he’s openly chasing the first three-peat since John Wooden’s UCLA dynasty won seven straight from 1967 to 1973. Duke and Kentucky each made three straight national championship games and won two in the 1990s, but no one else has even come close to a three-peat. It’s an audacious goal that Hurley is already howling about as a realistic expectation.
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“Some of the messaging is for the fans and the people associated with UConn so they know I’m not resting on what we did,” Hurley said. “And some of it is for the players, right? They read all this s—, so I want them to see publicly what our goals are.”
At Peach Jam, Hurley and top assistant Kimani Young wore stylish white sweatshirts with a fresh UConn logo that semi-subtly highlighted their consecutive national championships. Asked whether he was flexing to recruits the fact that he spurned interest from a college and an NBA blue blood — Kentucky and the Los Angeles Lakers — in the same offseason, Hurley grinned and pointed to the shirts.
“Our back-to-back gear just came in,” he said, “so right now we’re mostly flexing that.”
Which college will land Dybantsa, the No. 1 player in high school basketball?
While college coaches flock to Peach Jam to assess varying levels of high school talent, many of the NBA scouts in attendance were there to see one player in particular: AJ Dybantsa, the No. 1 recruit in the 2025 class and the early front-runner to be the No. 1 pick in the 2026 NBA Draft.
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Coaches are split on whether Dybantsa or Cameron Boozer — the No. 2 recruit in 2025 and the son of two-time NBA All-Star Carlos Boozer — will be the better college player, but most believe Dybantsa (pronounced Deh-bahn-sah) will be the better long-term pro. One NBA scout, watching Dybantsa courtside, said the 6-foot-8.5 wing “has a little (Jayson) Tatum in him.”
Dybantsa’s father, Ace, is handling his son’s recruitment and maintains he’ll play college basketball. “I guarantee,” Ace said. “He made a promise to his mama.” The question is where.
Dybantsa has taken visits to USC — when former Trojans and current SMU coach Andy Enfield was in charge — and Auburn, and he took an unofficial visit to BYU after new coach Kevin Young was hired. Dybantsa holds offers from every major program in the country, including Duke, North Carolina, Kansas, Kentucky and Alabama. Current industry chatter is that BYU and SMU are Dybantsa’s front-runners, but Ace was quick to clarify that his son is considering all options: “Don’t listen to those fake lists out there.”
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Asked what he’s looking for in his eventual college choice, Dybantsa said: “A good development program because I’m trying to be a one-and-done. A winning program. A family-oriented program.”
Dybantsa and his father are in the process of narrowing his list of schools and intend to announce by the end of July the ones they’ll visit. At that point, Dybantsa — who has only spoken to coaches thus far on three-way calls with his dad — plans to start speaking to coaches directly.
“Stress-free for him; that was the main reason (recruiting has been handled this way),” Ace said. “I mean, he’s 17 years old. Worry about the two B’s: ball and books.”
Earlier this summer, Dybantsa helped Team USA win the FIBA U-17 Basketball World Cup, scoring 14 points against Italy in the championship game. For his senior high school season, he’s transferring to Utah Prep, where he’ll pair with four-star point guard and Team USA teammate JJ Mandaquit. As for when to expect a commitment from Dybantsa, his father said it’ll happen in February 2025. Why then?
“Black History Month,” Ace said.
There might be continued transfer portal tweaks
While The Athletic was reporting its college basketball confidential series this summer, one sentiment frequently came up: that the NCAA is, effectively, powerless and therefore open to challenges on multiple fronts.
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That’s why, especially as multiyear name, image and likeness deals grow in popularity, many industry experts anticipate that overperforming players on such contracts could start having “buyouts” to break them early. (How long until we see a school sue a player for breaking a multiyear contract without paying a buyout? Probably soon.)
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But along those lines, another potential challenge emerged when talking to coaches and scouts at Peach Jam: Why do players still bother adhering to the NCAA’s defined transfer portal windows?
Before this offseason, graduate students could enter the transfer portal and commit whenever they wanted, even outside of the NCAA’s defined windows. (Next offseason, that 30-day window opens the day after the conclusion of the first weekend of the NCAA Tournament.) For example, former Rutgers guard Cam Spencer entered the transfer portal in late May last summer before committing to UConn in June and becoming one of the Huskies’ top players. But transfer legislation passed by the NCAA this spring stated that even graduate transfers had to be in the portal by the undergraduate deadline.
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Players still in the portal can commit anytime, but the only way players can enter anymore this offseason is if there’s a coaching change. That triggers an automatic 30-day window for that program’s roster (like what happened in June when former West Virginia coach Bob Huggins resigned).
But with the NCAA adopting legislation in April that allows for immediate eligibility for all multi-time transfers, what power does the NCAA have to punish players/coaches who go into the portal outside of those windows?
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One scout brought up the situation of former Kansas State and Memphis forward Nae’Qwan Tomlin as an example. Tomlin was dismissed from Kansas State’s program in December and signed with Memphis midseason, averaging 14 points and six rebounds for the Tigers during the rest of the season. Tomlin’s dismissal made his situation unique, but with the NCAA’s blanket approval of multi-time transfers, could other players — especially graduate transfers or those capable of graduating by December — transfer in-season from one school to another?
It’s not inconceivable, even if it still seems unlikely under the NCAA’s current framework. But with the sport’s governing body continuing to lose power (and court cases), a midseason portal window might not be the impossibility it once seemed.
(Top photo of AJ Dybantsa: Altan Gocher / Getty Images)