NCAA transfer portal is a doorway-full of crazy, but did make Iowa love Lucy Olsen

Like so much today, the NCAA transfer portal and its effects are things that would have been impossible to believe not long ago.

The portal is great for all the juicy news it brings each day it’s open. It’s not so great for what it’s done to the NCAA basketball tournament.

It’s great for how it’s swung the pendulum entirely from the end of athletics departments and coaches having all the power to making all players free agents at the end of each season. It has to swing both ways before it eventually lands in the middle.

The portal led to Iowa women’s basketball fans sure taking a shine to Lucy Olsen’s enthusiastic personality in just a few months. Her team-high 17.9 points per game probably helped endear her to fans, too.

The portal isn’t so great for something like this:

Tuesday, Iowa basketball announced on social media its first game with Ben McCollum as coach will be at home (of course) against Robert Morris on Nov. 4.

In pre-portal days, that would be an interesting opener. Robert Morris went 26-9 this season, and won the Horizon League’s regular-season and tournament titles. While the other No. 15 seeds in the NCAA tourney lost by 15, 25 and 30 points, the Colonials led No. 2 seed Alabama with seven minutes left before losing, 90-81.

RMU’s Amarion Dickerson had 25 points and 9 rebounds in that game. He has eligibility remaining. RMU’s Alvaro Folgueiras was the Horizon’s Player of the Year. He has eligibility remaining.

They and the Colonials’ two other top scorers are in the portal, greatly reducing the chances of Iowa to start its season 0-1.

Mid-majors are now junior colleges. If someone is good enough in their first year or two, off to a bigger program they go.

Most years, a low seed would shock a big team. Not this year. No team seeded 13th or lower prevailed this year, and none were closer to winning than Robert Morris was against Alabama.

The days of mid-majors being dangerous in the big tournament because they have older players who have been together for a few years are gone. Five of the six first-team All-Summit League players have hit the portal, and the sixth was a senior.

So that’s not great, but neither was what happened pre-portal. Just like now, coaches were let out of contracts to take other jobs while their players who were left behind were stuck with a new coach thrust upon them. If they transferred, they had to sit out a season.

Kevin Willard just bolted Maryland after three years to go to Villanova. Terrapin guards Rodney Rice and Ja’Kobi Gillespie, both of whom averaged more than13 points this season, immediately jumped into the portal.

Maryland quickly responded by hiring Buzz Williams from Texas A&M, which had hired him from Virginia Tech, which had hired him from Marquette.

Williams’ Marquette and Virginia Tech players couldn’t tag along without sitting out a year. The returning A&M players Williams is leaving behind can leave Texas as fast as Ted Cruz in a winter storm.

McCollum was able to leap to Iowa 12 months after he was coaching a Division II school largely because of the transfer portal. His insta-roster at Drake won 31 games this season, giving him a ticket out of mid-major land.

The portal has helped crush the mythology college coaches like to push about their teams being families. If families changed the way the teams do, Thanksgiving dinners would need the guests to wear name tags.

You hear the complaints from fans that they don’t get to know the players like they once did. I’m guessing fans of Final Four teams Auburn, Florida and Houston are OK having Johni Broome, Walter Clayton and L.J. Cryer for just two years.

They are the leading scorers of their teams, by the way.

Of course, the best men’s players have long left the college game while they were still teens. Five Big Ten players — Ace Bailey and Dylan Harper of Rutgers, Jace Richardson of Michigan State, Derik Queen of Maryland and Kasparas Jakucionis of Illinois — are projected NBA lottery picks this June. They’re freshmen.

As the poet said, ‘tis better to have loved and lost a lottery pick than never to have loved a lottery pick at all.

Comments: (319) 398-8440; mike.hlas@thegazette.com