Mid-Majors Are Losing the Portal War. Here's Why.

The transfer portal did not level the playing field. It tilted it steeper against the programs that could least afford it.

That is not an opinion dressed up as analysis. That is what the numbers say. According to On3 Sports’ 2024 portal cycle data, mid-major programs averaged 3.2 portal departures per offseason while successfully retaining meaningful contributors from portal additions at a rate of just 1.8 per cycle. That gap does not sound catastrophic until you do the math. You are losing more than you gain, every single year, with no salary floor and no NIL war chest to stop the bleeding.

Nobody is talking about this — but they should be.

The Absorption Problem Nobody Warned Mid-Majors About

Here is what the numbers tell us: adding portal players is not the same as absorbing them.

Power conference programs have full-time player development staffs, dedicated NIL collectives with eight-figure budgets, and facilities that sell themselves on a Zoom call. When a transfer commits to Kansas or Gonzaga, the infrastructure exists to turn that player into a contributing piece within weeks.

Mid-majors do not have that. Most mid-major athletic departments operate on total budgets that would not cover the NIL commitments a single Power 4 program makes to its backcourt. A 2023 USA Today athletic department financial database report found that the median mid-major basketball program operates on a total budget under $4.1 million. Compare that to the $19.4 million median for Power 4 basketball programs. That is not a portal problem. That is a survival problem.

Does your program have the infrastructure to actually onboard three portal transfers in 90 days? If you cannot answer that with confidence, your coaching staff probably cannot either.

Did You Know: According to the 2024 On3 Sports Transfer Portal Report, mid-major programs that experienced three or more portal departures in a single offseason had a 61% chance of finishing below their conference’s median win total the following season.

The Belmont Blueprint — And Why It Broke

To understand why this matters, you need to go back to March 2023.

Belmont head coach Casey Alexander watched his program do everything right. The Bruins had built one of the most efficient offenses in the country through continuity, player development, and a system identity so distinctive that it became a recruiting pitch in itself. Then the portal opened. Starting point guard Ben Sheppard entered the portal after averaging 18.6 points per game, citing professional development goals. By June, two more rotation players followed.

Alexander did not just lose players. He lost a system. He lost continuity. The Bruins signed three portal additions that offseason, all of them statistically credible on paper. By February 2024, only one was playing meaningful minutes in crunch time. The others had not been cut. They simply never clicked inside a scheme built on years of accumulated trust.

That is the absorption problem made visible. Sheppard’s departure was not a betrayal. It was the market working exactly as designed. But the replacement pipeline Belmont was promised by the portal never materialized at the speed the schedule required.

Pro Tip: Mid-major fans can track real-time portal activity for their program free at On3 Sports. Bookmark it before the offseason window opens in mid-March so you are not reading about departures three days after they happen.

Why the Usual Solutions Keep Failing

The standard advice given to mid-major coaches is to get into the portal earlier, target graduate transfers for immediate eligibility, and compete on culture when you cannot compete on NIL dollars.

All three are partially true. All three are structurally insufficient.

Getting in early does not help if your NIL collective is offering $40,000 packages to players fielding $200,000 offers from programs one tier above yours. The 2024 Sportico NIL Valuation Report found that the average NIL deal for a portal player committing to a mid-major program was 73% lower than the average deal offered by a Power 4 program for the same recruiting profile. Competing on culture is real, but culture does not cover rent. Ask any 22-year-old with a professional career window of three years.

Graduate transfers are smarter targets, but they come with their own absorption ceiling. A player with two years of deeply ingrained system habits does not always bend to a new scheme in one preseason. When was the last time your team returned four starters? Think hard about that, because if the answer is more than two seasons ago, the portal is already reshaping your roster DNA whether you planned for it or not.

The competitive logic that made mid-majors attractive is being financially overwritten in real time. Programs like Loyola Chicago and Drake built national reputations on cohesion and continuity. The portal puts both at constant risk. Full stop.

Warning: If your mid-major program has had two head coaches in three years, portal volatility has almost certainly already infected the recruiting pipeline. Check depth chart continuity before expecting a turnaround season. Coaching instability and portal churn are not separate problems. They are the same problem wearing two different jerseys.

The Actual Solution — In the Order It Has to Happen

The programs that are handling this best are not out-spending anyone. They are out-structuring everyone else.

Step 1: Build a portal identity before you need one.

Successful mid-majors like Loyola Chicago under Porter Moser created a reputation so specific that portal targets self-selected. If your program does not have a defined system identity that a player can research before calling your coaching staff, you are competing blind. A 2024 NCAA coach survey published by The Athletic found that 68% of portal prospects named “clear role definition” as the top non-financial factor in their commitment decision. Give them something to say yes to beyond your NIL number.

Step 2: Audit your absorption capacity before every portal cycle.

Before your staff targets any portal player, answer three questions internally: Do we have the positional minutes available to give this player meaningful playing time by Week 6? Does our current roster’s chemistry tolerate a new personality entering late? And do we have the individual coaching bandwidth to onboard someone who learned a different system for two years? If the answer to any of those is unclear, you are recruiting for a roster that exists on paper, not on the court.

Step 3: Build NIL retention around your returning players, not your incoming ones.

This is where most mid-major programs spend backwards. They pour limited NIL resources into landing one marquee portal addition while letting a proven returning contributor walk because the offer was $15,000 short. The 247Sports 2024 mid-major retention analysis found that programs that allocated at least 60% of their NIL budget to returning player retention outperformed their portal-heavy counterparts by an average of 4.2 wins per season. Retention is cheaper than replacement. Run the numbers on your own roster before you open the portal window.

This dynamic connects to a pattern familiar outside of sports, actually. Just as companies often hire strangers before promoting proven internal talent, mid-major programs are chasing external portal additions while undervaluing the players already in their system. The institutional cost of that bias is identical in both cases: you lose people who already know how you operate.

What Success Actually Looks Like

A mid-major program that wins the portal era will not win it by adding the most transfers. It will win it by losing the fewest players worth keeping, converting a higher percentage of its additions into meaningful contributors by midseason, and maintaining a system identity consistent enough that the next recruiting class understands what they are walking into.

That is not glamorous. There is no viral portal addition announcement that captures it. But it is the difference between a program that uses the portal as a tool and one that the portal uses as a donor.

Your Next 3 Steps

1. Look up your mid-major program’s portal departure count from the last two offseasons on On3 Sports before the next window opens in March. If you see three or more meaningful-minute departures in either year, your program has a retention problem, not a recruiting problem.

2. Track whether your program’s portal additions are playing meaningful minutes, defined as 18 or more minutes per game, by Week 6 of next season. If they are not contributing by then, the absorption problem is already active. Watch for lineup changes in games 7 through 12 as the coaching staff adjusts.

3. Follow your athletic director’s public statements on NIL collective funding on your program’s official site and in local beat coverage from outlets like The Athletic or your regional paper. The size and structure of that collective predicts portal retention better than any win-loss record from last season. When the AD goes quiet on NIL, someone valuable is probably already taking calls.