Thoughts on Alabama Basketball's Transfer Portal Situation: Just a Minute
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00:00 Welcome into Bama Citrals Just a Minute alongside Blake Beiler. I'm Katie Windham
00:07 and Blake, basketball season is over but portal season is alive in college
00:12 basketball and football as well but today we're gonna focus a little bit on
00:15 basketball. So far we've seen five scholarship players for Alabama
00:19 enter the portal and Chris Parker, Davin Cosby, Rylan Griffin, Sam Walters and Nick
00:25 Pringle. Some were probably a little more surprising to fans than others. Some
00:29 you could probably see the writing on the wall if their minutes were kind of
00:33 low at the end of the bench. But do you kind of expect any more people from
00:38 Alabama to enter the portal? What's kind of the general outlook like for Alabama
00:42 as far as adding more people to the portal or more people kind of departing?
00:48 Yeah I think this kind of is what college basketball is now is that there
00:54 are gonna be a lot of players that exit through the portal really every season
00:58 from every program. You might look at the five transfer portal exits and think
01:05 that's a lot but I think a couple of them you can see how it makes sense with
01:09 maybe Chris Parker, Davin Cosby, a couple of young guys who maybe weren't
01:14 guaranteed to get a ton of playing time next season going off to other places
01:18 but there's always gonna be somebody you don't expect. I mean last year I don't
01:23 think everybody expected Jaden Bradley, someone like him, to enter the portal and
01:26 then this year that may be Ryland Griffin that fits that bill. But I think
01:31 in general I don't think you need to panic about the losses that Alabama has
01:36 taken. Yeah a lot of these guys did play a lot of minutes last year. Ryland
01:41 Griffin and Nick Pringle in particular were starters in the Final Four but
01:46 Alabama we know is pursuing a center in the transfer portal. We know they're
01:51 pursuing guards. They've already brought in two really big transfers in Houston
01:57 Millett from Pepperdine, Chris Youngblood from USF, on top of a really stacked
02:01 recruiting class that also might have even more additions to it as the
02:07 offseason goes on. So this is just kind of how college basketball is. You're
02:11 gonna have a lot of exits and we know and we've seen Nate Oates work with a
02:15 lot of exits and turn it into a championship level roster. Last year only
02:21 three players returned from the 2023 team and Nate Oates brought in nine new
02:26 guys and still was able to make it work and put together a team that was able to
02:31 go on a run to the Final Four. And so I think if you're an Alabama fan you can
02:35 have full confidence in Nate Oates and his staff to be able to put a roster
02:40 together. I don't think these losses are very detrimental. I think obviously the
02:45 biggest one is Ryland Griffin with the season that he just had as a starter and
02:50 the jump he was set to make as a junior. He's definitely the biggest loss but
02:55 even with him out of the picture Alabama has a lot of guys that can play that
02:59 shooting guard small forward position that are able to kind of fill the hole
03:04 that he left. And so I think you could still have a ton of confidence in Nate
03:08 Oates to build this roster to fill the holes that are available. There are
03:13 probably still gonna be some some roster movement with more commits, more NBA
03:18 draft decisions that we're waiting on from Mark Sears and Grant Nelson. So the
03:21 roster is gonna look a lot different next year than it did this past year as
03:26 we saw the team go to the Final Four. But in general I don't think it's time to
03:30 panic, the sky's not falling or anything like that. It's just kind of how the
03:35 college basketball offseason works these days. Yeah it's just kind of the new
03:39 normal that fans, media coaches are all kind of having to get used to. And we've
03:43 seen the last two years that it's tough even sometimes because there's guys just
03:49 with the way the portal works in NIL, there's not really a lot of guys that
03:52 are willing to sit at the bottom of the bench and play low minutes. They transfer
03:56 out that Nate Oates hasn't even filled all his scholarship spots the last
03:59 couple years. You know this past year they awarded a walk on a scholarship
04:02 because there was an open spot and the year before Dabbing Cosby came in the
04:05 middle of the year because there was still a spot. So we could see that again
04:08 that you know that they don't even, with a sport as small roster wise as
04:14 basketball is when you look at compared to football the fact that they leave
04:17 roster spots open is kind of crazy. But it's just kind of the way the sport
04:21 works now. But yeah there's no there's no drama going on at Alabama or really
04:26 questioning of why things happen. It's just guys have to look for the best
04:30 opportunities for themselves and even though it's a team sport there's
04:34 definitely a big individual aspect to it at this time of the year. But I'm
04:38 continuing to continue following Blake for all the basketball portal news. He
04:41 has a great tracker up on Bama Central that you can kind of keep up with the
04:45 comings and goings of this Alabama basketball roster. But that will wrap up
04:49 today's Just a Minute. Thank you so much for watching.