AN EXPLORATORY ANALYSIS OF ACC MEN’S BASKETBALL AND THE TRANSFER PORTAL IN THE PAST 5 YEARS (2023)
Undergraduate: Sallie Davis
Faculty Advisor: Kristin Ondrak
Department: Exercise and Sport Science
The NCAA and colleges both use student-athletes to compete for scarce funds. Colleges invest heavily in athletes choosing to stay at their respective schools. The NCAA made $1.16 billion in 2021, and 85% of this total revenue was made from the NCAA Men's Basketball Championship, “March Madness ®.” The majority of the revenue – $986 million dollars – was made from television sales with networks like CBS and Turner Sports, while roughly 21% of it was generated from ticket sales at the games (Novy-Williams, 2021).
The purpose of this study was to describe the characteristics of Division One men’s basketball players in the ACC who choose to enter the Transfer Portal. This study is limited to the ACC as it is historically one of the best and most competitive conferences for Division One men’s basketball. This study investigated roughly two hundred and twenty-five NCAA Division One basketball players per regular basketball season. This study considered five consecutive years and studied approximately one-thousand one-hundred twenty-five athletes and found that the primary factor that predicts an athlete's probability of entering the Transfer Portal is their years of remaining eligibility – the less years of eligibility an athlete possesses, the more likely they are to enter the portal. In addition, this study found that there were secondary effects that increased an athlete’s likelihood of entering the Transfer Portal which were weight and high school recruitment rank were higher than average.