High Profile Pac-12 Transfers Are Strengthening Other Conferences
Where are Pac-12 transfers going and what might be some of the reasons for the departures?
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Last season, the big Pac-12 story of the transfer portal was intraconference transfers. Teams all over the league brought in impact players from other Pac-12 schools. None was bigger than Pac-12 Player of the Year Alissa Pili transferring from USC to Utah, but moves from Arizona State to Arizona and from Arizona to Colorado also brought in players who were significant additions at their new schools and significant losses at their old schools. That’s not the transfer portal story this season.
This year, the other major conferences are feasting on Pac-12 transfers. According to Heat Check CBB, so far this offseason, 34 players from the Pac-12 are known to have entered the portal. There are teams like Oregon and Arizona who have had several transfer out over the past few years, but no one is being left untouched—not even Stanford. That has not always been the case.
“We’re not active in the portal,” Stanford head coach Tara VanDerveer said last August. “I don’t even know how to get into it. It’s not really a part of our recruiting. We’re more into the development of our players, and I think that that’s something that our coaches do really, really well. People that come to Stanford want to be at Stanford...We have phenomenally individually talented players on our team, players that play come off the bench for us and could be starters other places. But they’re willing to pay their dues, so to speak, and be great teammates. And then when it’s their turn, they’re depending on other people to be great teammates for them. So, our younger players, for the most part, are playing a key role in our success.”
This year, those young players decided that they weren’t going to wait. Stanford lost three players to the portal. Last year’s No. 1 recruit, Lauren Betts, was among them. She is one of 17 Pac-12 players who have committed to a major-conference team that is either outside the league or will be after next season. In Betts’ case, that means a move to UCLA, which is in its final year of Pac-12 membership before moving to the Big Ten. The Bruins will have both the No. 1 and No. 2 players from last year’s recruiting class when Betts joins point guard Kiki Rice.
That movement outside the league means that some of the young talent that flocked to the conference just last season is now gone. Last year, the Pac-12 brought in more McDonald’s All-Americans than any league. Of the 24 players who were in the all-star game, 11 went to Pac-12 schools.
Stanford, which is one of the teams that brought in more than one McDonald’s All-American last season, was hit the hardest with both Betts and Indya Nivar opting to leave. While Betts will play in the league for one more season, Nivar is one of the 17 who has left the West Coast entirely, landing at North Carolina. They are joined by fellow McDonald’s All-American Paris Clark, who will also go from the Pac-12 to the ACC with the move from Arizona to Virginia.
Who is benefiting most from the former Pac-12 talent? Those at the top are certainly getting theirs, as South Carolina showed when it grabbed former Oregon point guard Te-Hina Paopao. Paopao became the last of Oregon’s No. 1 class from 2020 to leave Eugene.
That’s only a small part of the story, though. Most of the players are not going to top teams. In fact, they’re choosing teams that struggled last season.
TCU is trying to make noise in the Big 12 under new head coach Mark Campbell. The former Oregon assistant spent two years at Sacramento State before being hired to rebuild a program that won one game in the Big 12 last season. He has hit the portal hard in his move to do that.
Campbell has pulled in Sedona Prince from Oregon, Madison Conner from Arizona, and Agnes Emma-Nnopu from Stanford. Prince indicated when she left Oregon at the beginning of the season that she would be rehabbing her injury then moving on to the WNBA. She changed tracks to follow her former assistant coach to Ft. Worth, Tex. to try to turn around the TCU program.
Joni Taylor at Texas A&M is also going hard at former Pac-12 talent to help build a team that went 9-20 last season, including having a 2-14 in the SEC play. She picked up 6-foot-5 forward Lauren Ware from Arizona, who sat out last season with an injury, and guard Endyia Rogers from Oregon (by way of USC).
What is causing the movement, especially in programs that previously did not see much of it? Some coaches think it’s name, image and likeness carrots being dangled in front of players who are still at other schools. Such a charge was made on Twitter by Oregon assistant coach Jackie Nared-Hairston.
“Just curious, is it NIL or pay for play? The amount of teams that have reached out to our current players without being in the portal is crazy. I stand on the fact that we will do things the right way though. Guess you have to cheat to have an advantage these days. The number of kids in the portal that already know where they’re going is unbelievable. The college basketball’s off-season has really turned into free agency. IMO,” Nared-Hairston posted in a short thread.
At one time, Oregon was a program benefitting from the new NIL landscape. When Rogers transferred from USC to Oregon two years ago, she considered both the Ducks and Arizona. After committing to Oregon, she gave an interview stating that one reason she chose Oregon was the NIL law in the state.
Nared-Hairston is not the only coach in the Pac-12 stating that NIL is playing a role in transfer decisions. Arizona’s Adia Barnes has backed that idea up, saying that it was not exactly like free agency because the rules—what there are of them—are so different from professional leagues’ free agency. It all depends on who has what to offer.
“Now seeing all the NIL stuff, I think we’re going to see a lot of movement,” Barnes said. “This is the only system where there’s no cap. So, one person can offer a million and someone else offers 500,000, and that’s a real big disadvantage for smaller schools. Because even like us, I mean, some people we lost got more than $100,000 from someone else. We don’t have that kind of NIL money.”
Is NIL the reason players are moving? It’s tough to say because, while there are certainly rumors and beliefs, there’s little hard evidence or statements from players that this is what moved them to transfer. The basketball world is a small one, and players often do not talk about why they moved from one school to another. With money in the mix, the motivation to do so may be lower than it ever has been.
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