- The age of the diaper dandy is finished. The time of the transfer has come, and Mark Pope is willing to play the game John Calipari wasn’t: Transfer roulette.
- Kentucky is in the process of assembling one of the nation’s best transfer classes ahead of Mark Pope’s second season.
- Need proof for how the transfer model works? See Florida and its star Walter Clayton Jr.
The age of the diaper dandy is finished. The time of the zero-star recruit has come.
Duke and North Carolina can have the blue-chippers, because Florida had Walter Clayton Jr., a transfer from Iona, and that’s the modern recipe for national championships.
Gators coach Todd Golden built college basketball’s best backcourt by assembling Will Richard, Clayton and Alijah Martin from the transfer portal, adding one piece per year, until he had collected all three. They started at mid-majors. They finished by Gator-chomping Florida’s third national championship in the past 20 years.
Clayton, Martin and Richard had three combined recruiting stars among them coming out of high school, all assigned to Richard.
National championships won on the shoulders of one-and-done McDonald’s All-America recruits are becoming a relic in this transfer era, even if Duke’s ballyhooed freshmen Cooper Flagg and Kon Knueppel took the Blue Devils to the Final Four.
Florida has now won two more national championships the past 20 years than Kentucky, the SEC’s former standard-setter, and so here comes the fork in the road for Wildcats coach Mark Pope.
As the Wildcats try to get back on top, how willing is one of the bluest of blue bloods to play transfer roulette? John Calipari, Pope’s predecessor, made his living signing elite high school prospects. It worked until it didn’t, and Calipari resisted evolving.
Pope made his choice. He plopped his fistful of chips onto the roulette table, and he’s spinning the wheel. Welcome to the transfer sweepstakes, Big Blue Nation.
Mark Pope doubles down on transfers at Kentucky
A year ago, Pope had little choice but to play this game. He inherited a Kentucky roster in transition. Calipari took Kentucky players and recruits with him to Arkansas. To field a competitive team, Pope shopped for transfers who had a year of eligibility to spare. The makeshift lineup became serviceable enough for Kentucky to reach the Sweet 16.
Throughout the past year, Pope enjoyed more of a choice: Go all-in on high school recruiting, or save roster spots and capital for the April free agency period. He valued the latter.
He’s landed four transfers already, nabbing three bigs who address Kentucky’s need for more defense and length, plus point guard Jaland Lowe from Pittsburgh. A sweet-shooting transfer guard would be the chef’s kiss on this haul. Kentucky targeted Sam Houston State’s scoring dynamo Lamar Wilkerson, but he chose Indiana on Tuesday.
“The portal,” Pope said on “The Jim Rome Show” in March, “gives you a huge advantage over recruiting high school, because you have data from college. You have film (of players) running elite-level sets against elite-level defenses, doing it over and over and over again.”
In other words, instead of pinning March Madness hopes to teenagers who were playing high school hero ball the previous year, scout other college teams for the best players that fit your system, then pounce when they hit the portal.
Evaluation key for Mark Pope in transfer era
Transfer availability is no issue. It’s a matter of knowing which ones will blossom in a particular system, on the Power Four conference stage.
Corralling top high school recruits hinges on a coach’s ability to sell his program and possess the funds to finance the operation. Shopping the portal is more about spotting that the guard who averaged nearly 17 points as an Iona sophomore and will blossom into the NCAA Tournament’s most outstanding player as a senior for Florida, like Clayton did.
Auburn’s Johni Broome joined Clayton as the SEC’s best players in the nation’s best conference. Like Clayton, Broome started with two years at a mid-major – in his case, Morehead State.
“Walter and Johni, as 18-year-olds, would not be able to help an SEC program compete the same way, anywhere close to what they do now,” Golden told reporters before Clayton scored 30 points in a Final Four win over Auburn. Gators center Rueben Chinyelu joined the trio of guards to give Florida four transfers in its starting lineup.
Pope signed three high school recruits this cycle for Kentucky. That’s smaller than any class Calipari signed throughout his 15-year tenure, more evidence that Pope will take the operation in a fresh direction built on analytical thinking, 3-point shooting and transfer-fueled assembly.
Calipari felt shackled to his approach of allocating roster spots to the nation’s finest freshmen. He could sign them, and so he did.
Calipari’s Kentucky rosters were the envy of college basketball, until roster construction shifted amid this transfer era. Now, it’s transfers like Florida’s Clayton who are the stars.
“There are some advantages, some real, substantial advantages to recruiting guys out of the portal,” Pope told Jim Rome.
Accurate. See Florida as proof of concept.
Blake Toppmeyer is a columnist for the USA TODAY Network. Email him at BToppmeyer@gannett.com and follow him on X @btoppmeyer. Subscribe to read all of his columns.