True. Might as well make the best of the new reality. That's pretty damn cool we have two players in the top 25 nationally and really shows we aren't messing around here in Athens. Just hurts to see comments of "Why can't they keep players there?"

Sad state of affairs.

The portal is gonna look like a train that stopped on a dime and all the cars slammed into each other. It's gonna take a few years to get the cars undone from each other and get the train moving right again, especially with that extra year of eligibility. That will really take some time to undo. Last kid could easily be playing into 2025 or 2026 if I'm not mistaken due to the COVID year.....

What baffles me is how walk-ons that hardly played are putting their names in the portal. One guy (I won't name names) in two seasons appeared briefly in 8 games during mop-up minutes. He's 0-2 shooting for zero points in two years with zero rebounds and one steal. Even the lowest of the low D-1 programs won't be offering the guy a schollie. Maybe NAIA if he's lucky. Most likely scenario: Next stop - intramurals.

Exactly! For a person like him there are couple things. One placing themselves into the portal allows all schools that he is available and looking. Makes his job so much easier than before the portal if he wanted to change schools. Two, like most kids who do not play or are walk-on's, he probably sees that he is as good as others who have a scholarship and some who are playing. Three, as BLSS says, kid may just want to play!

You assume that education is a priority?

Why is it only college athletes that get sh*t for not prioritizing education? How many current OU students do you think are prioritizing their education right now vs. their social lives, hobbies, etc. How many are sitting in classes right now, f*cking around on their phones, just trying to skirt by with a B or whatever, and placing no emphasis whatsoever on retaining what they're learning? How many go out when they should be studying? How many are skipping classes, etc? A ton, of course.

But because a whole bunch of people ate up the NCAA's student athlete propaganda for years, it's only the student athletes who have millions of fans applying moralizing nonsense to them about the importance of an education. And a huge chunk of those very fans went to college and emphasized a whole bunch of things that weren't related to their education. I know I did. In fact, if I were to attempt to articulate the actual value of my time at OU, I'd probably weigh social growth just as heavily as my actual, hard academic experience.

That so many people feel like they can look at transfer portal activity and infer anything at all useful about how an individual feels about education is silly. You all are just carrying water for the NCAA.

If there's one thing I've learned about an education, it's that the only people get much out of it are people who are open to doing so. These kids either are or they aren't, and where they happen to be enrolled is pretty much irrelevant to the outcome in a majority of cases.

You are truly insufferable.

NM

ooof

I haven't seen any data yet on b-ball (probably later in the year) but the NCAA has released portal data for the last years for football. Interesting that 59% of D1A (aka FBS) transfers on scholarship found a schollie at a new school while 18% of those not on scholarship got one at a new school. It might actually be worthwhile for walk-ons to get in the portal; they'd be no worse off. A third of scholarship players in the portal are still looking for a new school or may have transferred to a non-NCAA school. Eight percent that were on scholarship at a D1A school transferred to a new school as a walk-on. Numbers for D1AA (aka FCS) were even worse: 34% got a schollie somewhere and 11% transferred as walk-ons. Players at larger schools have a better shot at landing a schollie somewhere, although they have less than a 60% chance at getting one. Given the number of players in the portal, the numbers for b-ball will likely be similar.