In A Volatile Transfer Environment, UNC Seeks Length and Continuity
By David Glenn
The 2025 national championship game between Florida and Houston offered an important reminder to college basketball coaches as they continue to construct their rosters for the 2025-26 season.
Even in this extremely volatile, transfer-laden era of college hoops, roster continuity matters.
It’s easy to think of transfers as nomadic, one-year mercenaries, especially given the growing importance of Name-Image-Likeness money, but many of the greatest transfer success stories have come when players switched schools after their freshman or sophomore season, then spent multiple years at their new school.
Just at this year’s Final Four, the best players at Florida, Houston and Auburn all fit this description.
Florida guard Walter Clayton Jr., a first-team All-American, played his first two years at Iona, in the lightly regarded Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference. The 2023 MAAC Player of the Year, he then became a second-team All-SEC player for the Gators as a junior before blossoming into a first-team All-SEC selection, the SEC Tournament MVP and the Final Four’s Most Outstanding Player as a senior.
Houston guard LJ Cryer, a third-team All-American, played his first three years at Baylor. He was a third-team All-Big 12 selection while with the Bears in 2023, then a second-team (2024) and first-team (2025) All-Big 12 pick with the Cougars over the past two seasons.
Auburn forward Johni Broome, a first-team All-American, played his first two years at Morehead State in the lower-tier Ohio Valley Conference. A two-time first-team All-OVC selection, he became a three-time All-SEC pick with the Tigers, and he was the 2025 SEC Player of the Year as a fifth-year senior.
More broadly, since the explosion of immediate eligibility for transfers in 2021, all four NCAA champions in men’s basketball have been teams with significant roster continuity.
Year — NCAA Champion (% Minutes Played By Returnees)
2025 — Florida (70%)
2024 — UConn (61%)
2023 — UConn (53%)
2022 — Kansas (81%)
That definitely doesn’t mean these title-winning teams avoided transfers entirely. In fact, all four of those recent national champions had transfers in key roles.
This year’s Florida team, for example, had six transfers in its 10-man rotation. However, only two of the Gators’ top seven players were in their first year playing for coach Todd Golden. The other five most important players, including transfers, had been with Golden for either two full seasons or his entire three-year tenure in Gainesville.
At every school, of course, roster continuity is only one offseason goal among many.
At North Carolina, for example, head coach Hubert Davis specified after the season that height and length were areas that desperately needed improvement, and he’s already made huge strides in that area as the Tar Heels look forward to their 2025-26 campaign.
UNC was one of the smallest teams in any of the power conferences during the 2024-25 season. For the first time in seemingly forever, the Tar Heels lacked a double-digit scoring presence, consistent rebounder and rim protector in the post. When junior forward Ven-Allen Lubin led the Heels in rebounding at 5.5 per game, it marked the lowest such number since UNC began tracking it as an official statistic way back in 1951.
“We’ve got to get bigger. We just do,” Davis said during his final radio show of the season. “From A to Z, we just do. And we talked about the physicality of Ole Miss (in the NCAA Tournament), and their positional size was bigger than us, and pretty much that’s the way we were the whole season. So that’s one of the things that we’re definitely going to address is, we’ve got to get bigger. In terms of that physicality, you have to have a presence, you have to be bigger. And that’s what we’re addressing.”
Next season, UNC men’s basketball head coach Hubert Davis will be coaching his first team without R.J. Davis. Based on the players who are exhausting eligibility, like Davis, and outgoing players in the portal, there will be several scholarship spots available. (AP Photo/Chris Seward)
In 2024-25, Carolina often put out a lineup comprised of players with the following heights, some of which were obviously inflated on the official roster: 6-0, 6-1, 6-3, 6-6, 6-8.
In 2025-26, thanks to Davis’ solid work with both high school prospects and transfer portal entries, the Tar Heels more often will have a lineup that looks like this: 6-3, 6-3, 6-6, 6-9, 7-0.
While Davis and his staff have been able to check the height/length boxes with offseason additions such as 7-0, 235-pound Arizona center Henri Veesaar (pronounced VAY-sar; a 2025 honorable mention All-Big 12 honoree), 6-9, 205-pound forward Caleb Wilson (a McDonald’s All-American) and 6-6, 191-pound West Virginia wing Jonathan Powell (a 35-percent shooter from 3-point range), the Tar Heels’ roster continuity element has been more elusive this year.
Last March and April, UNC had a wonderfully quiet experience with the outbound transfer portal. As other teams were losing four, six or even 12 scholarship players to the portal, the Tar Heels lost only one: little-used backup center James Okonkwo.
This year has offered a much rockier road in that regard. Sophomore point guard Elliot Cadeau, a two-year starter, left Carolina for Michigan. Junior forward Jalen Washington, a part-time starter, departed for Vanderbilt. Freshman wing guard Ian Jackson, a prep All-American with NBA potential who averaged 12 points per game this season, most recently entered the portal.
In this volatile transfer environment, one way to promote roster continuity is to seek out transfers with multiple years of college eligibility remaining. Veesaar, for example, will be a redshirt junior in 2025-26, eligible to return in 2026-27. Powell will be a sophomore next season, with the ability to play for three years in Chapel Hill. Carolina continues to pursue other portal targets, including point guards, and some of those players still have multiple years of college eligibility ahead.
This doesn’t mean there’s no place for one-year wonders.
Brady Manek certainly turned out well for Carolina in 2021-22, Davis’ first season as the Tar Heels’ head coach, on a team that made it to the NCAA title game. Two years later, Harrison Ingram and Cormac Ryan played key roles on a UNC squad that won the ACC regular-season title and advanced to the Sweet 16. Ingram signed with the Heels with the idea that he might spend two years in Chapel Hill, but his All-ACC campaign turned him into a 2024 early NBA entry and second-round draft pick.
The roster-building challenge has always been about putting together the best possible team, offensively and defensively, ideally with built-in elements of leadership, toughness, basketball IQ and competitive fire.
Now it’s about a more complicated balance, too, because even in this highly volatile era of immediately eligible transfers, there’s tremendous value in having a nucleus of key players who stay together under the same coach, even if for only two or three years in a row.
David Glenn (DavidGlennShow.com, @DavidGlennShow) is an award-winning author, broadcaster, editor, entrepreneur, publisher, speaker, writer and university lecturer (now at UNC Wilmington) who has covered sports in North Carolina since 1987.
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