INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — The blue-and-maize confetti was still flying around the stadium when a new tradition in college basketball kicked off without much fanfare.
The transfer portal opened.
Every team out there with title hopes for 2027 — even the new champions at Michigan — knows the chances of cutting down the nets a year from now will hinge largely on how well they fare in that phase of the game.
Between the time it opened at midnight through 11 a.m. Tuesday, more than 1,200 players had already entered the portal, according to an Associated Press review of the numbers. Hundreds more are expected to flood the market over the newly condensed two-week period before the portal closes on April 21.
It's a free-for-all filled with cash offers to players in exchange for the use of their name, image and likeness — essentially to come and play.
Nobody navigated this new NIL era better in the season just completed than the Wolverines and coach Dusty May. Four of the five starters who led Michigan to its 69-63 win over UConn on Monday night played at other colleges last season. It figures at least three of them could be in the NBA next year.
“It’s important to get the right people on the bus,” Michigan assistant Justin Joyner said, referring to the team he helped build and the next one he must put together.
It's the same across college basketball — newly crowned NCAA champion coach Cori Close of UCLA said the “transfer portal just got easier” after her team's win over South Carolina — and across college sports.
For the men, the biggest names in the portal so far include Flory Bidunga (leaving Kansas), John Blackwell (Wisconsin) and Juke Harris (Wake Forest).
Not every team will be looking for a total rebuild.
UConn made its third Final Four in four seasons based on a targeted use of transfers. Coach Dan Hurley likes to do the old-fashioned thing and find players who will stay for three or four years. But he's realistic. One of his best players this season, Tarris Reed Jr., came to UConn from Michigan.
“We want to supplement our roster with some strategic portal moves like we were able to do,” Hurley said.
Duke and Michigan are the early favorites for 2027
BetMGM Sportsbook listed Duke and Michigan as the early 8-1 favorites to win it all next year. Florida was next at 10-1, followed by Michigan State and Arizona (both 14-1) and UConn (15-1). North Carolina, which has tabbed Michael Malone as its new coach, is 25-1.
The Big Ten is back
The national title is back at Michigan for the first time since 1989. Almost as notably, it's back in the Big Ten for the first time since 2000 (Michigan State).
The Wolverines' victory Monday gave the Big Ten a sweep this year of football (Indiana), along with both Division I basketball titles.
According to Sportradar, this marks the first time the conference has held both the football and men's hoops titles since 1941, when it was known as the Big Nine.
Beyond bragging rights, there is a business side to it all. Last year, the Southeastern Conference got all the buzz by placing a record 14 teams into March Madness and taking the title to Florida.
This year, the Big Ten put a conference-record six teams in the Sweet 16, four in the Elite Eight, two in the Final Four and brought the championship back to its home turf. The conference has won the last three football championships while the SEC hasn't won one since 2022, when it capped a string of four straight that left some wondering if the sport had grown too lopsided.
All of this has a deeper meaning for the two conferences that play an outsized role in shaping the future of college sports, which includes a long-running disagreement over the future of the all-important College Football Playoff and its big paydays: The Big Ten wants a big expansion to 24 or more teams while the SEC does not.
“We’re very proud members of the Big Ten, I’m proud to be in there,” said Michigan athletic director Warde Manuel, whose own regents have been bickering with the conference over its desire to bring outside investors into the league. “My AD colleagues are working hard to do the same thing that I’m doing tonight, talking to you guys, being here with the confetti, having our team cut down the net. So all of that stuff is really good.”
The freshmen can play, but the veterans cut down nets
It was another year in which freshmen-led teams were not able to finish the six-game push to the title.
Michigan won this year with transfers filling all five starter spots, even if there were some key freshmen contributors. Arizona — a team that leaned heavily on the brilliance of freshmen Brayden Burries and Koa Peat — spent nine weeks at No. 1 in the AP Top 25 and won 36 games, only to fall to the Wolverines in a Final Four rout.
That comes a year after Florida won the title with senior guard Walter Clayton Jr. being named Final Four most outstanding player.
The Gators won in a year in which a freshman-heavy Duke team — No. 1 overall draft pick Cooper Flagg and lottery picks in Kon Knueppel and big man Khaman Maluach — lost to Houston in the national semifinals.
Only two teams powered by one-and-done NBA talents have won the championship: Kentucky in 2012 with eventual No. 1 overall pick Anthony Davis and Duke in 2015 behind Jahlil Okafor.
Trump, Congress and courts
The background noise in college sports, which never shuts off, will include court cases and continuing negotiations in Congress as the NCAA and other stakeholders looks to find a compromise to enshrine many of the industry's new rules into law.
President Donald Trump generated headlines in the buildup to the Final Four be issuing an executive order that suggested schools could lose federal funding if they don't comply with rules surrounding paying players, the transfer portal and how many years a player is eligible.
What will the rules be? Ultimately, it seems Congress will have to decide. But one key sticking point will come over individual players' rights to sue the NCAA over eligibility — an ongoing issue that has landed the NCAA in court dozens of times.
In a largely overlooked development last week, the NCAA notched victories in a pair of those eligibility cases. One involved four former West Virginia football players who sued over whether their junior college experience should count against their eligibility window. The other stemmed from Virginia quarterback Chandler Morris' request to play a seventh season.
“We win way more of those than we lose,” NCAA president Charlie Baker said at the Final Four last week. “It’s a very small universe here that we’re talking about. And an even smaller universe that wins in court. And part of the problem with that is the length of time it takes to process that out to the complete end.”
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AP Basketball Writer Aaron Beard contributed to this report.
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AP March Madness bracket: https://apnews.com/hub/ncaa-mens-bracket and coverage: https://apnews.com/hub/march-madness
