If Tyree Bryan portals, wouldn’t be surprised if Todd Golden wouldn’t grab him…
I’d throw whatever money we have left at Rataj.
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I hope he stays but if Bryan departs we need to find an experienced, capable 2guard/wing scorer.
Otherwise we’d be very young at that spot w/ Hammond and the two incoming frosh.
Rataj will be a senior and may be hoping to improve his NBA opportunities. SCU might make sense. Plenty of offense needed next year and Herb does have a few recent NBA draft success stories.
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Tyeree enters the portal…
Good luck to this great young man, but so sad to see him go.
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Damn, that one hurts.
He’s been one of my favorites and IMO one of our most consistent performers and our best defender on the wing. Some great highlights and games in his 2 seasons….the GU win of course but also some other games were he was hot from 3, some highlight reel dunks, etc.
Best of luck to him. I hope he lands in a good situation where he get’s solid PT, has an opportunity to improve, and maybe gets a chance to play in the NCAA tourney.
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Damn is right! I know we focus on NIL potential which no doubt is a big factor, but I don’t think we can minimize the importance of reaching the NCAA tournament. It’s possible, if not probable, that Tilly and Bryan said externally or internally that this program hasn’t gotten to the dance in 30 years and it won’t happen under Sendek. They have one more shot at it. Can’t blame them!
Conversely, I acknowledge kids like Cam and BK who gave this program everything they had and are soon to be proud graduates and alums.
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Day 3 arrives and the main update other than Tyeree 
is that two more Toreros are leaving SD, and now Lavin’s squad is finally starting to look a bit thin.
Overall, there are so many players in the portal that it’s hard for me to believe that all of them–or all of the good ones, at least–actually find new teams. Can we really play musical chairs with over 1500 players? I guess we will find out.
Predictions are a loser’s game, but here’s one: I think this year or next will be the zenith of the portal. There are about 4,500 D1 scholarship men’s basketball players and more than a third will probably enter the transfer portal this year, some just for leverage on their current teams. With the House settlement and revenue sharing model coming, plus nascent unionizing efforts (stalled out though with Trump’s NLRB), student-athletes are going to become university employees very soon which will probably be the thing that finally saves college athletics to some degree. Players will have buy-out agreements like coaches so that a “homegrown” talent like Tilly helps fund the program when he leaves. Spending caps will be put in place that can help create some modicum of parity across the sport.
It’s all heading that direction, I think, but we are about to go through the most chaotic off-season (and maybe two) before some order finally gets put back into the system.
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This would perhaps be a bit more appropriate for a recruiting thread, but I’ll post it here for now. Here’s a table of the players who had remaining eligibility from the past three seasons using Torvik’s ratings. First is PRPG which is roughly the number of points that a given player contributes by their presence on the court (not necessarily scoring) over the average D1 player–it’s like Box Plus/Minus adjusted for tempo. Then standard BPM. Then Offensive Rating. The point is to see in broad strokes what the theoretical “next year’s team” is/was building from.
I’ve included players who have already entered the portal to show the “potential” team and illustrate the cost of a given transfer. I also only used the in-conference numbers because being later in the season, there’s a little less noise than if you include the entire season, in my opinion.
2025 Potential Returners
| Name | PRPG | BPM | O-Rating |
|---|---|---|---|
| Christoph Tilly | 3.2 | 5.9 | 118.8 |
| Elijah Mahi | 2.5 | 4.7 | 114.3 |
| Brenton Knapper | 2.3 | 7.7 | 134.7 |
| Tyeree Bryan | 2.0 | 1.9 | 113.3 |
| Jake Ensminger | 1.5 | 2.8 | 122.4 |
| Bukky Oboye | .1 | -5.5 | 95.3 |
2024 Potential Returners
| Name | PRPG | BPM | O-Rating |
|---|---|---|---|
| Johnny O’Neil | 2.8 | 6.0 | 114.8 |
| Adama Bal | 2.3 | -1.0 | 104.6 |
| Christoph Tilly | 2.2 | 2.5 | 113.4 |
| Jake Ensminger | 2.0 | 3.8 | 125.1 |
| Tyeree Bryan | 1.3 | -1.1 | 114.9 |
| Brenton Knapper | 1.2 | 1.4 | 105.3 |
| Camaron Tongue | .6 | -2.9 | 103.0 |
2023 Potential Returners
| Name | PRPG | BPM | O-Rating |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brandin Podziemski | 6.2 | 10.5 | 126.7 |
| Carlos Stewart | 2.8 | 2.3 | 106.0 |
| Christoph Tilly | 1.9 | 3.3 | 121.3 |
| Parker Braun | 1.3 | 1.7 | 105.8 |
| Camaron Tongue | 1.0 | -1.7 | 105.5 |
| Jaden Bediako | .7 | -2.4 | 101.7 |
| Brenton Knapper | .6 | -1.0 | 106.8 |
Plenty of noise in all this even still. But a couple quick thoughts. First, Tilly is likely the biggest loss and looks to be third behind Podz and Jalen for hardest-to-replace player that still has eligibility. He is well behind those two–Podz was basically a miracle transfer who carried that 2023 team and made everyone better–but still quite good. Second, Knapper’s facilitation is worth a lot, and he shouldn’t be underrated. It’s pretty clear that the team is better with him on the floor. Ensminger is similar but to a lesser degree. That said, you do need to score, so having solid and steady role players like Brenton and Jake doesn’t make a winning team except maybe in Moraga.
Last, with Mahi, Knapper, and Ensminger returning, SCU would have a better returning group than going into 2024 but much more shaky than coming into this year. There is no front court right now. Oboye will need to take a huge step forward, Graves will need to be as good as advertised, and Chukwudebelu will probably need to be at least 60-70% of the one-and-done type player that he was once projected as. And SCU will still need a very solid transfer or two on top of that.
The losses aren’t quite fatal yet, but it will be hard to replace both Tilly and Bryan, and the staff will need to find, maybe not the next Podziemski (a boy can dream), but like two Johnny O’Neils and the next Tyeree Bryan to maintain the current trajectory.
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Boy am I glad the scouts and agents we are meeting with see more than these numbers! They’ve all pointed out - Cams 3 pt assist for screens and SCU rebounds for O’Neil and Ensminger was his boxing out in the key. lol
They also said our defense improves with him on floor.
Cuz these numbers look horrible.
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I guess we are going to be relegated to being the “Pittsburgh Pirates of NCAA basketball”. We get them in, they turn out to be good, and then head off to greener pastures.
The analytics numbers need to be taken with a grain of salt, to be sure. PRPG is the best of the numbers listed because it tries to account for playing time and lineups. BPM tends to favor starters and the players in the strongest lineups. Since it just measures the changes in raw score when a given player is on the floor, the starter who plays during the initial run of a blowout game gets a high BPM. But since Knapper generally didn’t start or run with the most offensively powerful lineups, I think his BPM is illustrative. Offensive efficiency favors players who are highly efficient. That’s where the number maybe over-values Knapper and Ensminger because they generally only take clean, open shots. That’s to their credit, to be sure, but it’s also because they aren’t asked to shoulder the scoring load. Look at Podz’s efficiency versus Knapper’s from this season. No way is Knapper the better player, but he isn’t asked to shoulder the same burden. So the numbers above are very broad strokes.
In any event, Camaron’s 2025 numbers were improved: 2.0 PRPG and an offensive rating of 120.0. That’s quite good.
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Welcome to the full effect of NIL… adios to the days of NCAA tourney surprises from mid majors and below.
On the fast track to D3 sports at SCU. There’s no going back.
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I actually don’t think this is completely true yet.
But I think we have a year or two to decide whether we are massively ramping up or sitting out.
Of course, we would all need to “see it to believe it” when it comes to serious NIL (5-7M)
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Four decades ago, schools could pick and choose which division each sport could compete in…which is why we were able to keep football for so long. Football got hit with a double whammy: 1) the mandate to be in the same division for every sport at a school (club sports excluded, of course); and 2) Title IX requiring scholarship balance between men’s and women’s sports (rightly so).
I bring this up because I doubt SCU would want to relegate all sports to D3 (thinking soccer). More likely would be to kill basketball and maintain D1 for all other sports.
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The administration and the athletic department has made it abundantly clear on numerous occasions that they have no intention to ever be anything but a D1 school.
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What I’m suggesting is that the D1 that you think of (specifically in regards to mid/lower majors) is turning into D3 right before our very eyes.
You can call it what you want, but it’s essentially turning into what we currently think of as D3.
It is the case that D3 (and D2) teams can elect to play 1 D1 sport - many collegiate hockey teams in the NCHC, for example, operate this way.
Locally for me, Colorado College plays D3 sports but Division 1 Men’s Ice Hockey and Women’s soccer.
Here’s a full list.
The Pioneer football league, in which USD competes, is a weird analogue to this - it’s a D1 football league (because all the member schools play D1 sports), but operates like a D3 team - no scholarships. Had it existed at the time of SCU’s decision, we may have opted to do so.
Dunno if SCU would go to a NorCal equivalent of the SCIAC and try to play D1 hoops nonetheless…
Would personally love, if a NorCal SCIAC-style D3 conference came to pass, seeing Gaels and Broncos play football. But it seems the tenor in California is less football at all college levels over time.
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I tend to align with Buckets view of the future and not Bettererer’s binary doom/gloom.
IF there are changes to SCU athletics (division, scholarship commitment, etc.) and I emphasize IF, then I expect it would more surgical and not an all or nothing action such as moving the entire athletics program to DIII.
St. Francis ¶ is getting press for getting an NCAA invite and then just deciding to drop down to DIII. The doom and gloom crowd will say: ‘See, it’s just beginning’. But IMO, while some smaller schools, schools in weaker financial position and/or with weaker athletics programs, etc. may in fact make the choice or be forced to drop to DIII but I don’t see every non-major doing that.
Aside from the fact they are both catholic schools, there is little to no comparison between St. Francis and SCU. St.Francis has a small enrollment of 1,700 undergrads, an endowment of $60M and is located in a small town and not within a metro area. Meanwhile SCU has 6,000 undergrads, an endowment of $1.5B+ (yes with a B) and growing and is located in Silicon Valley. No real surprise that St.Francis is bowing out, they probably should have done so a decade ago. Doesn’t mean SCU is resigned to follow the same path any time soon.
If there are further significant changes that impact DI hoops I suspect the more likely outcome would be some sort of bifurcation where the Power Conferences split off but the mid-majors and select sub-mid-major continue on at DI with a system similar to the FBS / FCS (formerly 1-A, 1-AA) subdivision in football.
And/or, as Buckets and 'Nasty notes, the NCAA rules revert to being more flexible and allow leagues/schools to participate at different levels per sport. But that’s a far cry from entire athletic programs dropping to DIII and non-scholarship.
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