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Court Report: How Marquette became one of college basketball's best teams despite shunning transfer portal
Marquette had everyone fooled after refusing to promise NIL money to transfers. "Hell no, we ain't doing that," Shaka Smart said
www.cbssports.com
A big night in Milwaukee awaits Wednesday. The 11th-ranked Golden Eagles of Marquette host No. 16 Xavier at 7 p.m. ET on CBS Sports Network with sole possession of first place in the Big East on the line.
Not bad for a team that was picked ninth in its league by media and coaches alike. Here's how Shaka Smart's worked his way to almost certainly winning Big East Coach of the Year.
There are just a handful of high-major programs that did not add a Division I transfer last offseason. Most of them (UCLA, Indiana, Michigan State, Iowa) were given benefit of the doubt in the preseason and projected to be NCAA Tournament teams. Not Marquette. After making a surprise run to the NCAA Tournament as a No. 9 seed in Year 1 under Smart, the program lost four of its top six scorers. Marquette was young, but Smart and his staff went into last spring like almost every other coaching staff in college basketball: prepared to scour the portal and court a couple of players.
Then, the news of Nijel Pack's $800,000 NIL deal to go to Miami dropped, and it changed everything.
"When the news came out about [Pack] going from Kansas State to Miami, that was a watershed moment in transfer recruiting in our sport," Smart told CBS Sports. "It completely altered what other transfers wanted."
Marquette was at different stages of recruiting four transfers. And practically overnight, the tone and expectations of those recruitments changed, Smart told me. He didn't like what he was hearing and quietly abandoned those recruitments — and stopped recruiting D-I transfers altogether last spring.
"We made the decision: Hell no, we ain't doing that," Smart told CBS Sports. "First of all, it's illegal, but we're not prioritizing some guy that hasn't worn a uniform over Tyler Kolek and Oso Ighodaro."
One of the guys Marquette was talking to wound up in the Pac-12. Two more found spots elsewhere in the Big East and another is now in Conference USA.
Recruiting experts, any idea who those recruits might be, specifically the ones in the Big East?