The age of the diaper dandy is finished. The time of the zero-star recruit has come.
Duke and North Carolina can have the blue-chippers, because Florida had Walter Clayton Jr., a transfer from Iona, and that’s the modern recipe for national championships.
Gators coach Todd Golden built college basketball’s best backcourt by assembling Will Richard, Clayton and Alijah Martin from the transfer portal, adding one piece per year, until he had collected all three. They started at mid-majors. They finished by Gator-chomping Florida’s third national championship in the past 20 years.
Clayton, Martin and Richard had three combined recruiting stars among them coming out of high school, all assigned to Richard.
National championships won on the shoulders of one-and-done McDonald’s All-America recruits are becoming a relic in this transfer era, even if Duke’s ballyhooed freshmen Cooper Flagg and Kon Knueppel took the Blue Devils to the Final Four.
Florida has now won two more national championships the past 20 years than Kentucky, the SEC’s former standard-setter, and so here comes the fork in the road for Wildcats coach Mark Pope.
As the Wildcats try to get back on top, how willing is one of the bluest of blue bloods to play transfer roulette? John Calipari, Pope’s predecessor, made his living signing elite high school prospects. It worked until it didn’t, and Calipari resisted evolving.
Pope made his choice. He plopped his fistful of chips onto the roulette table, and he’s spinning the wheel. Welcome to the transfer sweepstakes, Big Blue Nation.
