In the previous two installments of these Summer forecast pieces, I mentioned that despite what most projections will say, there may still be some sneaky reasons to be optimistic about next year’s season outlook. Probably the most important aspect of that optimism is the potential upside of several incoming transfers, particularly the duo of D’Marco Dunn and Puff Johnson. Both of these players were top-100-rated high school prospects, but neither has been able to make a consistent impact at the college level just yet.
Favour Aire is another highly-rated prospect transferring into the program (#119 247Sports Composite), but he gets a free pass for this limited production in my book, as he’s only been in college for one season, and generally speaking, it takes big men a little longer to make an impact than guards and wings. I would expect his true arrival at the college level to still be another year away at least, so he doesn’t truly belong in this conversation yet.
Dunn and Johnson, on the other hand, each already have 2 and 3 years in college, respectively. Ironically, both come to Penn State from Hubert Davis’ North Carolina program and came off the bench in limited roles for the Tarheels. This isn’t meant to be a knock on them necessarily, as there are understandable and even justifiable reasons behind both Dunn and Johnson’s limited contributions. But their paths in college basketball thus far put them in a category that I thought might be worth digging into more.
Highly-rated prospects who move from one high-major program to another aren’t totally uncommon. But if we drill down further into that group, the players that stay multiple years at their first school without regularly making the starting lineup are a bit harder to find. Strangely, Penn State welcomes 2 of them this coming season in Dunn and Johnson.
I was curious about similar cases and the frequency at which these cases happened in the modern portal era. Maybe more importantly for the topic of this piece and the question around how optimistic we should be about these guys next year, I wanted to look at the pre and post-transfer production of players in these types of scenarios.
The Criteria
In order to identify a look-a-like group for comparison in this case study, I took the full list of transfers for the past 5 seasons and started filtering. I was specifically interested in highly-rated high school prospects that transferred out of high major programs after struggling to make an impact there. To qualify for this comparison group, all of the above conditions had to be met:
Players graduating high school in 2017 or later
Players with a Top-100 Consensus 247Sports High School Rating
Players who committed to a “High Major” program out of High School and spent at least 2 seasons there, but did not graduate (removing any grad transfers)
Players who played less than 50% of the total possible minutes during their first two seasons.
Players who transferred from one high major program to another.
Since the pool is limited to the class of 2017 and beyond, but players must have spent at least 2 years in college before transferring, that means I was looking only at prospects from the class of ‘17 thru the class of ‘20. From this 4-year window of prospects, I was able to identify 103 Top-100 Rated prospects who have transferred at least once so far in their careers. Out of those 103 players, 45 of them stayed at their initial school for at least 2 seasons and failed to play more than 50% of the available minutes, not including a few cases of guys with major injury problems that I’ve excluded.
After filtering further for the destination school criteria, as well as removing a few outlier cases that involved players leaving school altogether, I was left with just the 16 players shown below.
There are some mixed results here, and a few guys who still have some eligibility remaining so the book isn’t completely closed on how their college careers will wind up. But we can make some broad conclusions:
Minutes increased after transferring for all but two players. Over half of the 16 players saw an increase of 10+ minutes per game.
Scoring increased as well for all but three players.
Rebounds and assists were also up for the vast majority of players.
Only 4 players reached a double-digit scoring average at their new school(s).
Reading into this more, the trend here seems to be that most of these players did find bigger roles after transferring, but almost none of them became a star even after leaving. At least not a star that matches up to the billing they had coming out of high school. It’s also important to note that there were 29 players from that list of 45 above (the ones who stayed 2 years at their first school) who all transferred down to mid or low-major programs.
There are of course the other 58 players out of that initial 103 (103 - 45 = 58) who either left after only 1 season at their first school, stayed long enough to use their free grad transfer, or suffered injuries/issues that threw a wrench in their careers. Within this group, you find a number of players who never panned out just like in the other group, but there are also a number of guys who became bonafide stars at the college level: Oscar Tshiebwe, Johnny Juzang, Jahvon Quinerly, and Walker Kessler just to name a few.
The Blue Blood Connection
When looking ahead, there are 9 players that fall into the same group going into next season (so far) including Puff and D’Marco (see below). Even more impressive than Penn State having two incoming players on this list, you’ll notice that North Carolina has three outgoing when you add in Dontrez Styles.
This list features a lot of Blue Blood schools, which was a common theme on the larger list of previous seasons as well. Depending on how you classify “Blue Blood” (and there is some debate there), the list of 103 transfers I mentioned above has anywhere from 20-50 outgoing transfers from those types of schools. Blue Blood programs make up a disproportionate amount of the outgoing list no matter how you identify them.
It’s not difficult to imagine cases where promising young prospects go to Blue Blood programs alongside a bunch of other very highly-touted prospects, don’t find the minutes they hoped to in such a competitive environment, and have to look elsewhere to find more opportunities. That probably doesn’t describe every situation of course, I hate to generalize and each player’s career path is unique, but it’s fairly obvious that when these Blue Blood schools sign entire rosters of 4 and 5-star recruits, there are only so many minutes to go around and some of those recruits will not see the floor as often as they expected.
Conclusions
So what does this case study tell us to expect from the duo of Dunn and Johnson next season? Many fans seem to think that Penn State has snagged a pair of highly underrated players who were simply victims of circumstance in Chapel Hill, playing behind veteran starters and for a head coach who did not believe in utilizing his bench (UNC was 360th nationally in bench minutes last year). In that same vein, I’ve seen some suggest that if mighty UNC was interested enough to give them scholarships, surely they’re more than good enough for Penn State basketball. This argument seems a bit flawed since PSU objectively had a better basketball team last year than UNC, but we can look past that for now.
The bigger problem is that the evidence above seems to indicate a trend with these types of players. I hate to use the word “overrated”. I’m not sure it’s completely applicable here, but the data absolutely suggests a pattern. Perhaps some of them were poorly evaluated as high school players and wound up over their heads at the high-major level. Other times there could be injuries or off-the-court issues at play that aren’t captured in the data. Regardless of the “why”, most transfers leaving under similar circumstances have not gone on to find a great deal of high-major success after changing schools.
I hope it’s not a controversial take to suggest that many players who leave high-major basketball programs, particularly Blue Bloods, probably did not belong at that level. Within the more specific subset that I’ve filtered for above, where I’m focusing on players in limited roles after 2+ years, there appears to be an even higher frequency of guys who are best served moving down a level or two. Of course, as fans, we always hope that our guys are the exception. If Mike Rhoades believes these guys belong here, we have no good reason to doubt him on that (yet). But this will be an interesting topic to revisit in a few years and one that I’m hoping looks quite silly in hindsight.
That wraps it up for the Summer Forecast series. Next, I hope to finish up some video work looking at the offense I expect Rhoades to be running next year. No ETA on that yet.