Missouri Valley Basketball: Impact of recent transfers on the league

Operating in the “new normal” of the transfer portal

Players transfer for many different reasons. They could even be academic! While we can’t evaluate if a player feels like his transfer was a successful move or not, only the individual can decide his own fate and how he rates the move.

Does Yesufu consider a national championship with virtual no playing time a success? Is Robinson excited to be the leading scorer on a bad team? Conversely, are players that ended up with less than stellar results, still positive about the move because of a better relationship with their current coach?

These decisions are deeply personal and we shouldn’t declare them correct nor deem them a mistake, but basketball programs rise and fall with some of these decisions.

Valparaiso lost three players that were major contributors to other Division 1 programs. Their departures crippled a team that had to rebuild on the fly to be competitive. If Clay, Robinson, and Ognacevic were still wearing Beacons’ jerseys, Valpo could have had a significantly different season and would perhaps be Valley favorites for the upcoming season.

Conversely, the Valley’s top four teams were largely unaffected by transfers and weren’t deeply involved in last year’s portal pandemic.

Season two of this new era of college basketball recruiting will begin to show us what ‘the new normal’ will be. Already, during this second round of a Missouri Valley Conference transfer portal watch, we see that Northern Iowa has lost its second-leading scorer. Missouri State has seen two-thirds of its backcourt head out of Springfield. Incoming programs Belmont and Murray State have been gutted by transfers.

Bradley watched the departure of ‘Newcomer of the Year’ Terry Roberts, and the league’s second-leading scorer, Antonio Reeves (Illinois State) is also in the portal.

The ‘new normal’ is anything but normal.