PHILADELPHIA — It’s been four years since college athletes have been able to legally profit from their name, image and likeness.

It’s been less than 10 years since those same athletes could enter the NCAA’s transfer portal without needing to redshirt an entire competitive season. Yet, it feels like so much of what transpires is still taking shape in real time, not just for the students who partake but also for the coaches, officials and administrators who navigate it.

College sports, specifically revenue-generating college sports, have become a year-over-year proposition for coaches to find and retain talent. That last part has become even harder given the trend of student-athletes initially recruited to big-time schools jumping ship after not receiving what they anticipated, often to smaller midmajors, and becoming big fish.

Conversely, student-athletes who have outkicked their scholarships at a mid-major can enter the portal for a fresh start at a power program — and potentially a substantial payday.

It’s an extremely time consuming process depending on what side of the ball you’re on.

Coaches have retired as a result. Administrators have stepped down, arguably unable to keep pace with the new realities of the industry; some of whom have spent the latter part of their lives involved in it.

But who it’s been fantastic for is the athlete. It’s why, according to Front Office Sports, over 4,000 players across men’s and women’s college basketball programs entered the most recent transfer portal, representing the highest number of players in a single year in the history of the NCAA.

One of those players is Truth Harris, La Salle’s graduate guard, who followed the university’s new head coach, Darris Nichols, after Nichols succeeded Big Five legend Fran Dunphy in March.

For Harris, 23, his fresh start with the Explorers represented his third Division I program and his fifth school since 2020.

After his start at East Tennessee State, Harris, a Mt. Vernon, N.Y. native, who led Mount Vernon High School to a state title in 2017, spent two years at Pensacola State and Indian Hills Community College, both JUCO programs where he starred. It afforded Harris a position with Nichols at Radford ahead of the 2023 season — and he has been alongside him since, making the jump to Philadelphia for the first time earlier this year.

While Harris sees these moves as opportunities, there are some within college sports who view them as exploitation and a lack of control by governing bodies.

Harris, who noted that his move to La Salle was promised alongside a five-figure sum through NIL opportunities, is why many students like him see the portal as a better way to navigate a college career.

“It was always going to get to this eventually,” said Harris in a sit-down with The Philadelphia Inquirer this summer. “I feel like students do deserve the recognition, do deserve the money. As student-athletes, we do go through a lot. We push our limits. We have to get paid for that. So yeah, I think [the new reality of college sports is] right where it should be.”

Many of the top earners in the 2025-26 college basketball season would agree. The highest paid hooper, BYU guard AJ Dybantsa, is earning roughly $4.4 million this year, according to On3 NIL valuations. In fact, according to the list, the top 10 earners in men’s college basketball, all stand to make over $1 million this season.

Far from the days in which the guarantee of a college scholarship or a “full ride” was the allure.

These days, that comes standard.

Student-athletes are guided by the promise of a payday, with the masses that continue to jump into NCAA’s transfer portal serving as proof.

‘It’s not that hard, really’

Instructions on how to to jump into the NCAA’s transfer portal are readily available on the NCAA’s website. However, it’s a process in which, once a player decides to jump, there’s a bit of an unknown. But if you’re a proven talent, according to Harris, it’s pretty straightforward.

“When you enter the transfer portal, you don’t know what’s going to happen,” Harris said. “If we are saying if there’s stress [involved], I would say that’s the bad stress? But at the same time, when you start hearing from schools and hearing those schools out, it does ease you down a bit more.

“The hardest decision is picking the right school, picking the right option for you. And that all goes into [questions like] is the team good? What’s the coaching like? What’s their history, their culture? It’s about making sure they want you for the right things, and you’ll be a good fit there. But once you do it once, it’s not that hard, really.”

Perhaps what causes little concern is that for student-athletes freely moving from school to school, many are moving with general studies majors, or in Harris’ case, chasing a master’s in communications, a degree he noted as “a well-known major that a lot of schools carry.”

In Step 1 of the NCAA’s guide to transferring schools, there’s a line that reads: “Your new school should help you satisfy both your academic and athletic goals.” However, school graduation rates for athletes reflect the lack of emphasis on academics.

“I think we’ve opened up two different can of worms when we opened up the transfer portal and NIL at the same time, it became chaotic,” said Nichols, who said that there’s one proponent that’s not being talked about enough, the fluctuating graduation rates for student-athletes and the impact it has on the schools being treated like a revolving door.

“I think that if we’re about student-athletes graduating, we should be focused on retention and doing what’s best for both parties. Everybody’s talking about the money situation, but to me, let’s clean up the situation of these student-athletes transferring so much but making sure they still graduate.”

However, according to the NCAA, Division I Academic Progress Rates, known as APRs, a metric which is supposed to hold colleges and universities accountable for the academic performance of student-athletes, graduation rates hover around 83% as of the 2025 season — though that did see a four percent decline since last year.

“I think that there are just some challenges people don’t talk about,” Nichols added. “If you’re a player that’s transferring every year, are all your credits rolling over, so you’re actually eligible? Something as simple as uniforms, think about it: you bring in nine new players every year, you’ve got to get nine new uniforms. And for people who say, ‘Well, why don’t you just not put their names on the back,’ every one of them comes in different sizes and [a player] can be number 0 to 99.

“So it’s not just about the cost of NIL for potential players, it’s about operating costs, budgets, revenue. Everybody’s talking about NIL, but there are the little things that go into all this change.”

Works both ways

Still, to ask Nichols, a former Division I star at West Virginia, whose playing days preceded NIL, players should be compensated. That’s not the issue. The issue is the time coaches spend trying to field winning teams every season in what’s essentially become a free-agent market.

“You’re constantly trying to get kids to buy in,” Nichols said. “When I was playing, it was a buy-in for four years. And now it’s buy-in for a year. Look, we’re not in a position to try to hold anybody back. If you play here, you do well, and you want to go elsewhere, I get it. But as a staff, we do our utmost to just have honest conversations with [our players] about the new landscape of athletics and not try to hide behind it.”

It’s impossible to hide when the data is so stark that most schools, especially mid-major schools, will see significant movement across their programs each year, specifically in revenue-generating sports like football and basketball.

Across the 364 Division I programs in the NCAA, 1,156 undergraduate transfer portal entrants found new homes in men’s basketball alongside 384 graduate entrants this past offseason. Women’s basketball found 720 undergrads finding new homes alongside 344 grad student entries.

On the men’s side alone, that would average out to four players who a coach would need to replace on their roster — solely from transfers — before entering the 2025-26 season.

For players like Harris, who stands to graduate from La Salle after the journey he’s embarked on over the last five years, it’s a new reality he’s happy to have benefited from.

“It’s just a better feeling,” Harris said. “You’re more relaxed. You can do more things for yourself without having to ask your mother and ask your parents for money all the time. I feel like it’s a relief off my parents to know they don’t worry about me [financially]. They’re not worried if I’m good or not because they know I am.

“So if you’re asking me? Yeah, I think it’s a reality that’s right where it should be.”

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