One of the biggest part of college athletics today is the transfer portal. It is especially relevant in college football and basketball, and it affected the Duke basketball team this offseason as the Blue Devils have lost seven players to the portal. Duke head coach Jon Scheyer recently talked about the transfer portal on The Devil Den Pod, and he thinks that tampering is a big problem in college basketball.
Duke basketball lost seven players in the transfer portal, and Jon Scheyer said that all of them were contacted during the season. That is tampering, and it is not allowed. Programs are not allowed to contact a player that is not in the portal, but it seems like it happens very often in college basketball.
“There's tampering all the time,” Scheyer said during an appearance on the podcast. “I could tell you, the seven guys we had transfer, all seven of them were contacted throughout the season. Look…that's the way it goes. That's the era we're in. And so, you have to just be ready to attack those things in real time.”
The Blue Devils lost a lot of good players in the transfer portal this offseason. Jeremy Roach, Sean Stewart, TJ Power, Jaden Schutt, Jaylen Blakes, Mark Mitchell and Christian Reeves decided to all leave for a different school. Like Scheyer said, those seven were all apparently contacted during the season.
Tampering is something that gets talked about a lot in college sports and it's no secret that it is done a lot. Players will come right and say that they were contacted during an illegal period, and yet there doesn't seem to be a lot of punishing that is going on. Jon Scheyer is well aware that it is a big problem, and he is clearly used to it by now. Navigating that issue is part of the job for the Duke basketball coach.
Duke basketball is also bringing in four transfers
Jon Scheyer and the Duke basketball team lost seven players to the transfer portal, but they also did land four commitments from the transfer portal. Sion James, Mason Gillis, Maliq Brown and Cameron Sheffield are all joining the Blue Devils. That is a solid transfer portal class, but the incoming freshman class is what Duke fans are most excited about.
The Duke basketball recruiting class, headlined by Cooper Flagg, is the best in the country and it isn't particularly close. The Blue Devils have an absolutely loaded class and that has likely contributed to how things have gone in the transfer portal for them. The players knew that a lot of these incoming freshman are going to be ready to play right away, and they might be coming for starting spots. The Blue Devils also didn't need to do a lot of work in the transfer portal as they knew they had a lot of fresh talent already coming in.
The bottom line is, tampering is happening a lot in college sports, and nothing is really being done about it. It will be interesting to see how this issue gets addressed in the coming years.
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