BYU guard Richie Saunders enters NCAA transfer portal

BYU guard Richie Saunders has entered the transfer portal, according to On3’s Pete Nakos. He played two seasons with the Cougars and enters the portal on the heels of Mark Pope’s decision to leave BYU for the Kentucky job.

Saunders played in 34 games during both the 2023 and 2024 seasons, starting just three times. He averaged just over five points per game as a freshman but made a jump to score 9.6 points per night in year two and with efficient 63.6% shooting inside the arc and 36.4% shooting from beyond it.

Of course, all BYU players entering the portal could be considered options for Kentucky, since Pope has just taken over the job there. Perhaps that’s what Saunders decides to do, and he could definitely survive at that level, but he could very well have other options to evaluate first.

He certainly isn’t the first BYU player to enter the portal following Pope’s move. He joins unique and skilled-passing-big-man Aly Khalifa who entered and has already announced he’ll either come back to BYU or transfer to Kentucky or Louisville. There’s also Cougar point guard Dallin Hall who was first to enter after Pope left.

Kentucky brand should help Pope in recruiting

The BYU gig is unique in the recruiting aspect, since the school is able to sign the overwhelming majority of Mormon athletes but can often struggle to reel in elite talent from outside the state. With Mark Pope having spent the last chapter of his coaching career with the Cougars, there’s worry he could be behind then ball as a recruiter.

When asked about that concern by Matt Jones while appearing on Kentucky Sports Radio, UK athletic director Mitch Barnhart answered that Pope will have a much easier time getting players to a brand name like the Wildcats.

“Yeah, well, I think I think that the proof’s in the pudding, obviously, and we gotta go get that done. So I get off the phone with him last night and already talked to me about two players that he couldn’t get to come to have a conversation with him at BYU that already called him back and said, ‘Coach, I’ll come to Kentucky,’” shared Barnhart.

“So it is about the name on the front. It’s about the name on the front of the jersey, right? And there’s something about that brand,” he added, noting that even during a year that went poorly for Kentucky in March, the Wildcat program was still the No. 1 story on the day of the national championship.

“So if you go back and you look at — if you look at just in the social impressions from Monday, at 3:00, until Tuesday at 3:00, the University of Connecticut won the national championship, obviously, and they had 17 million impressions in that 24 hour period. Kentucky basketball, coming off of something that everyone would agree is not where we want to be, in a same 24-hour period of time we had 37 million impressions. Over double.”