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Topic: Transfer Portal - An Analysis of the Haul

Topic: Transfer Portal - An Analysis of the Haul

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QuantCat
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Member Since: 7/15/2025
Post Count: 25

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Transfer Portal - An Analysis of the Haul

Posted: 4/8/2026 12:25:41 PM

With portal season heating up, I wanted to take a look back at our past transfer hauls, where each player ranked coming in, and how they actually performed. My plan is to use this post to break down our past portal classes, and then come back once we have a roster in place to analyze the current class and what it means for the upcoming season. All data displayed is from EvanMiya.com.

Why is EvanMiya the gold standard for college basketball analytics? Historically, sites like KenPom and Torvik leveraged advanced metrics to analyze teams on a per-possession basis. This helps normalize analysis for pace and puts fast and slow teams on an even playing field. EvanMiya builds on those tools by starting with line-by-line, play-by-play data. Because of this, his model generates metrics that account for pace and for who is actually on the floor. If a game is in junk time and a bench player scores a ton of points on the other team's benchwarmers, this system accounts for that directly and won't artificially prop the player up.

What are the metrics?

- OBPR: The impact a player has on the offensive side of the floor. An OBPR of 0 is the average across NCAA D1. A player like Jason Preston with a 4.81 is well above average, and someone like Jalen Breath with a -1.93 is below average.
- DBPR: The impact a player has on the defensive side of the floor. Similar to OBPR, the D1 average is 0. Someone like Jason Carter with a 2.35 is an above-average defender, and someone like Dior Conners with a -1.78 is a below-average defender.
- BPR: OBPR + DBPR. This is the player's overall impact on the game. Unsurprisingly, the highest of the Boals era was Jason Preston with a 6.37 (4.81 OBPR + 1.57 DBPR). Others that stick out include Mark Sears with a 5.44 (4.67 OBPR + 0.77 DBPR) and Jaylin Hunter with a 5.39 (4.37 OBPR + 1.02 DBPR).
- Projected BPR: A projection of how good a transfer portal player is going to be the following season. This attempts to account for situations where a player may have been elevated or held back by their previous team being exceptionally good or bad.

Let's walk through past portal classes, starting with 2022 and going through last year. (Note: Players who transferred up from non-D1 schools, like Tommy Schmock or Vic Searls, do not have data for projections).

Past Portal Prospects (Year - Player: Previous Season BPR | Projected BPR | 1st Season Actual BPR)

- 2022 - Jaylin Hunter: 2.36 | 2.56 | 5.49
- 2022 - Gabe Wiznitzer: -0.77 | 0.04 | -3.76
- 2022 - DeVon Baker: -0.06 | -0.59 | 0.37
- 2023 - Shereef Mitchell: -0.86 | -0.08 | 2.47
- 2023 - Ike Cornish: -2.15 | -0.65 | -2.29
- 2024 - Jackson Paveletzke: 0.89 | 0.58 | 1.15
- 2025 - Javan Simmons: 1.94 | 2.70 | 2.20
- 2025 - Jalen Breath: 0.16 | 0.25 | -1.39
- 2025 - Dior Conners: -0.90 | -0.51 | -2.82

Who were the biggest wins relative to their projections?

- Jaylin Hunter: Came in as a very good portal prospect and emerged as one of the best players in the conference for two years. His defensive impact metrics really stick out - he was a good offensive player, but his defensive stats made him an elite MAC player.
- Shereef Mitchell: Outperformed expectations. Worth noting that his first two seasons at Creighton saw numbers similar to what he did at Ohio, so his projections were likely skewed down by a single bad season.

Who were the biggest losses relative to their projections?

- The Wiz: Projected to be a solid rotational piece but netted out his first season as a -3.76, one of the worst rotational seasons in the Boals era. Fun fact: The Wiz was the first player that honed me in on the EvanMiya data. I had high hopes for a former 4-star, 6-11 center, but noticed early on that the other team tended to go on runs when he was on the court. The data very much supported that theory.
- Conners and Breath: Both ranked as roughly average portal prospects, and both saw significant regressions from where they were in prior seasons.

Moral of the story: players projected to be high-value prospects (Hunter/Simmons) tend to hold up and, in the case of Hunter, outperform projections. Players projected to be negatives tend to remain negatives, and average players tend to remain exactly that. Are the projections perfect? Absolutely not. The model needs enough historical data on a player to be accurate, and it really struggles to predict outcomes for guys who transfer down without much playing time. The model forces those players toward average, which makes them incredibly volatile - a Daniel Freitag at Buffalo can project as average and emerge as a top player in the conference, while an Ike Cornish can project as average and turn out to be a negative. Even with players who have a lot of minutes on tape, it is hard to account for system fit from one spot to another.

I plan to follow up in this thread when the portal haul is complete to compare where the team projects out relative to past teams. As a sneak preview, Kyler D'Augustino projects as an even better portal prospect than Simmons. EvanMiya predicts him to be a 3.13 for next season, making him the highest-rated portal prospect we have landed in the portal era. It is also a huge plus that he is a local kid and will likely bring in some extra attendance.

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