Eric Musselman addresses current direction of college basketball, transfer portal

On3 imageby:Alex Weber07/31/22

Arkansas head coach Eric Musselman knows a thing or two about the transfer portal. After all, he was an early pioneer of it, using transfers to build out his best teams at Nevada years ago before he left to coach the Razorbacks. In his eyes, these last few years of transfer portal movement are the tip of the iceberg. Because the portal and players being able to come and go to schools as they please is becoming a major annual occurrence across the country.

Musselman spoke on this particular topic just recently, reflecting on the growing nature of player movement across all sports at all ages. Not just in college basketball.

But Muss handled volatile roster situations in the past, due to his time in the NBA. Where the coach is rarely in charge of which players are or aren’t on the roster at a given time. He compared those situations:

“I know the question gets asked a lot about, you know, so many new faces. It’s not going to phase us or our system. I’ve said it a thousand times, [I’m] used to Jeremy Lin, Steve Novak and Danny Green getting called up within a week and you have to re-adjust your team in a day.”

With rosters changing nearly every day at the NBA level, putting together a college roster — that at least is together for a whole year usually — is a much easier task. But that offseason movement is becoming a large part of the game now too.

“This is college athletics, you know what I mean? It’s not just Arkansas. And it’s not every going backwards from what we’ve seen. When this thing passes, from what we’ve read about — everybody can transfer as much as [they] want, it’s going to change even more.”

That does make things harder on the coach. But will favor the forward-thinking minds among them. Those who are ready to attack the offseason rather than hesitate and question whether it’s good for the game.

“So as a coach, as a roster management guy, as a GM, whatever you want to call it — you better be able to adjust on the fly and you better be able to do it quickly.”

Eric Musselman also believes these are changes happening to the sports world at large. From college to pro to even in high school.

And it’s not just here. It’s way more NBA free agents moving around and way more guys going to multiple high schools. Way more guys playing for 100 different AAU teams. And that’s where we are as a sports world right now.”