Breaking down Penn State basketball's scholarship chart after Myles Dread announced his return
Penn State basketball guard Myles Dread announced on Tuesday that he will return for his fifth and final season of eligibility.
Dread averaged 6.2 points and 2.7 rebounds for the Nittany Lions this season, shooting 41 percent from 3-point range.
He revealed in a statement that he had been playing with a “severely” torn labrum in his right shooting shoulder.
“It was important for me to persevere for my teammates, for my coaching staff, and for Penn State,” he wrote. “Immediately after the season, I underwent surgery to repair my shoulder and get as healthy as possible, and now I start my journey to get in the best shape of my life.”
With Dread’s return solidified, here’s what Penn State’s scholarship situation looks like this season and beyond.
*Asterisk denotes a player with a fifth season of eligibility resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic
| Fifth Year | Fourth Year | Third Year | Second Year | First Year | 2023 Class | |
| G Myles Dread* | F Seth Lundy* | F Caleb Dorsey* | F/C Kebba Njie | G Logan Imes | ||
| G Jalen Pickett* | F Jevonnie Scott* | G Dallion Johnson* | G Jameel Brown | G Braeden Shrewsberry | ||
| G/F Evan Mahaffey | ||||||
| G Kanye Clary | ||||||
| F/C Demetrius Lilley |
Penn State basketball scholarship chart takeaways
Dread’s return means that the most experienced player when it comes to Big Ten competition on Penn State’s roster is back for another season.
Alongside Jalen Pickett — who transferred in ahead of last season — the Nittany Lions now have two fifth-year players heading into the offseason.
Between the six returnees (although further transfer portal exits are certainly still possible) and the five-man freshman class, Penn State is using 11 of the 13 scholarships available to it as of late March.
That gives the Nittany Lions two open spaces with which to go transfer shopping.
“For next year’s team, we do want to add a couple of older guys so we don’t have to lean on those freshmen just to be primetime players right off the bat, which is really hard to do as a college freshman,” head coach Micah Shrewsberry said. “No matter how good you are, freshmen struggle a little bit.”
Notably, the only players taller than 6-foot-7 on Penn State’s projected roster at the moment are freshmen — Kebba Njie and Demetrius Lilley. That area is certainly one that the Nittany Lion staff will attack in the transfer portal, and whether they can land a difference-maker at that spot could go a long way toward deciding how next season goes.
Elsewhere, the Nittany Lions suddenly have much less experience at guard following the departure of Sam Sessoms, who entered the portal.
Should Dread, Pickett and Dallion Johnson all start as they did most of the time down the stretch in 2022, the only guards on Penn State’s bench would be freshmen.
“The transfer portal is a little bit different because it’s like speed dating,” Shrewsberry said. “So you may get a guy and you don’t know everything about him…So it’s a gamble whether or not you try and build around that every single year. There could be issues that you run into. We want to do it on a need basis, to fill spots that we may need.”
