A Third of D-I Players Have Changed Schools
In the Power Five, the SEC has the most intraconference moves
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In July, Old Dominion Head Coach DeLisha Milton-Jones announced the signing of nine players for the current season, bringing the total number of newcomers to 10. On its 15-player roster, all but one had played at another school before joining the Monarchs, the highest percentage of any NCAA team this season.
Nearly one in six players on NCAA rosters this season previously played at a different school, according to an analysis of roster data. For Division I players, that rate is closer to one in three. Just 13 D-I teams - not counting the Ivy League - do not have a transfer player on their rosters. Transfers are nothing new in college basketball, but the additional eligibility provided by the NCAA during the COVID-19 pandemic has helped make the transfer portal a hotbed of activity.
While it’s easy to find lists of impactful transfer players, tracking the universe of school-switchers can be a complicated business. Not all teams provide details on previous teams on their rosters, and access to the portal itself is limited, so while there are good-faith efforts to detail players who enter the portal, this analysis is based on a compilation of rosters for every NCAA team. In some cases, team rosters did not list a player’s previous school, but did indicate that a player joined the team from another program, making it easier to identify the previous school. For the purposes of this story, “transfer” means any current player who played at a previous school, including junior and community colleges, regardless of when that transfer occurred.
Although transfers occur at every level of college basketball, they mostly are a Division I event. More than 1,600 D-I players this season came from another school - more than 32 percent, almost twice as high as the percentage for D-II. In some conferences, transfers represent a significant portion of athletes: led by Old Dominion, more than 51 percent of the Sun Belt’s 200 current players have switched schools. Next are the Southwestern Athletic Conference at 49% and the Western Athletic Conference at 47%. Of Power 5 conferences, the Big 12 has the highest percentage of transfer players with 45%.
The Big 12 is a standout among the Power 5 conferences; the others’ percentage of transfers range from between 27% (Big Ten) to 36% (SEC). And the Big Ten figure is boosted by Penn State, where three of four players on the roster have experience at another school, the highest percentage of any P5 team.
Nearly half of the transfer players switched from one D-I school to another, with 31 stepping up to D-I from D-II and just four making the leap from D-III to D-I. Within the Power Five conferences, switching schools in the same conference is a rare event, but that definitely doesn’t apply to the SEC. There are 18 current players in that conference who previously played on another SEC team, three times the number of Big Ten players who have moved within the conference. The Big 12 is the only conference not to have former players from all four other major conferences; it has no Big Ten transfers. The Pac-12, meanwhile, has more internal transfers (10) than external ones (nine) from Power 5 conferences.
While two-year schools - community and junior colleges - still provide a steady source of players for four-year colleges, there are many Division I schools with multiple former players scattered across other rosters. Buffalo, which lost its previous coach, Felicia Legette-Jack, to her alma mater, Syracuse, in 2022, has a dozen former players on rosters this season, including four with the Orange. Arizona, Auburn, Oregon and Penn State all have 11 former players on NCAA rosters this season, with eight more D-I schools having 10 former players elsewhere. In each of those cases, including Buffalo, the players left for other D-I schools.
The single top transfer source for NCAA players this season is Trinity Valley Community College in Athens, Texas, which has 14 former players on rosters, including 12 on D-I teams ranging from Austin Peay to Portland State. It’s not like all of those players transferred this past season; the extended eligibility rules mean that three of the 14 are graduate students on their current teams.
There are plenty of teams, even some D-I teams, that don’t have a transfer player on their rosters. Setting aside the Ivy League universities, which don’t permit graduate students to play and have more restrictive transfer policies, the D-I teams with no transfers on their rosters this season include UConn and Stanford. Even Navy has one, Lizzie Holder, who previously played at Colorado, and whose Buffs bio includes this skill: “Can drive a manual transmission”. Alas, while Holder is listed on the Navy roster, that talent no longer appears.
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