It wasn’t long ago that men’s college basketball fans would crack jokes about the four- or five-year players who seemed like they never left the sport. Duke’s Greg Paulus, Pitt’s Levance Fields and Brandin Knight, Ohio State’s Aaron Craft, Kansas’s Perry Ellis. Fans of virtually any school had those rival players who seemed to haunt their programs, making four years feel like a full decade.
With extra years of eligibility granted by COVID-19, some college athletics careers are longer than ever. However, the single-school senior is on the verge of extinction. Small-school superstars tend to jump up to the Power 5 after the first signs of success—and the promise of lucrative NIL dollars. Role players at a top Big Ten or SEC program have less patience. The transfer portal contains thousands of names each time it opens, leaving college basketball rosters virtually unrecognizable from one year to the next.
