2026-27 College Basketball Preseason All-Transfer Team: Louisville's Flory Bidunga is top player out of portal

Inside why these transfers are primed to shine at their new schools, plus preseason risers and fallers A narrative was brewing that you couldn't build a championship-level team with a roster chock full of transfers. "There are no pros in the portal," Houston coach Kelvin Sampson said at the 2024 Big 12 Media Days. "If they were pros, they wouldn't be in the portal. They're all college guys looking to improve." Michigan changed the math, laying out a blueprint of what's possible when you hit four grand slams in the portal. Dusty May started four transfers (Yaxel Lendeborg, Morez Johnson, Aday Mara and Elliot Cadeau) on the way to Michigan's National Championship last year.

Lendeborg, Johnson and Mara became lottery picks. Michigan may be a special outlier, but that didn't stop teams from dropping big bags in free agency to acquire top-shelf transfer talent with the hope that if it all clicks, they could be playing on the first Monday in April, too. Exhibition play provided some hints about where some high-priced portal coups sit in the hierarchy of their new teams. Transfer portal rankings are irrelevant now. The stone-cold truth is that a few big-name transfers are going to flop this year. It just is what it is. Change is hard, plus some situations have changed dramatically since the