BLOOMINGTON – Braylon Mullins committed to UConn on Wednesday, his decision becoming the latest pivot point for an IU fan base undeniably split on the status quo around its men’s basketball program.
Perhaps it shouldn’t.
Make no mistake: Losing Mullins to the Huskies — like losing Jalen Haralson to Notre Dame — is a blow for Mike Woodson and his staff. They invested meaningful time and effort into recruiting both players, each among the first in-state prospects Woodson has clearly targeted as a priority, and now two talented players from what’s perceived to be Indiana’s recruiting backyard are going to be playing college basketball somewhere other than Bloomington.
No one, presumably, will understand better the importance of local flavor on an IU roster than Woodson, the Indianapolis native who matriculated from Broad Ripple to become one of the Hoosiers’ best-ever players. Mullins would’ve helped Indiana right away. Now he’s going to be helping someone else right away. That’s not a positive development.
Yet through four years on the job, Woodson has never treated locking down his home state like a top priority. He’s taken in-state commitments, most recently Trent Sisley, formerly of Heritage Hills and now at Montverde Academy in Florida. But Woodson’s recruiting ethos at the prep level seems to boil down to: Indiana will compete for either a) players it thinks fit the way it wants to develop long term, b) elite high school talent or c) both.
When it cannot fill its roster with players meeting those criteria, it turns to the portal, which is sometimes cast as an example of Woodson’s inability to plan effectively for the future.
Which is where we meet a question more fundamental than whether Indiana will succeed or fail without Braylon Mullins: Is the transfer portal just as effective a means of roster construction and management as high school recruiting?
The answer is yes.
For a long time in college basketball, the word “transfer” came with a label. Transfers were extreme cases, both of a player’s mistake in going somewhere they didn’t stick and a program’s mistake in allowing a hole to open in its roster it could not plug the normal way, with prep recruits.
That was never very fair, of course, but transfers — and particularly successful transfers — were rare enough they could be treated as outliers.
This changed about 10-12 years ago, when players started exercising the graduate transfer exception to up transfer (the practice of transferring from a smaller program to a larger one) near the end of their careers. We in the media treated this like an epidemic (it wasn’t), a problem demanding a solution (it didn’t). And for folks who didn’t like it, those quickly became the good old days.
It all became bundled into the wider push for athletes’ rights in college sports, the rehashing of which isn’t important to this discussion. What is important to understand is that after literal decades spent severely limiting the practice of athlete transfer, the evolution of the practice in the six years since the inception of the portal has been a system shock we’re still coming to grips with.
There’s an extent to which even now, the portal is considered a last resort. The glass to break in case of emergency when Plans A, B, C and D don’t pan out. Woodson has not treated it that way.
Make no mistake, Indiana would be better off next year for having Braylon Mullins, or Jalen Haralson. But backstopping their absence with the transfer portal isn’t a lack of planning. It’s a choice.
Consistently since his hiring, Woodson has spent a lot of his time and capital in recruiting targeting either elite high school talent, or high-profile portal entrants. That hasn’t always worked, of course, but it’s very clearly been the plan. Indiana has taken players like Gabe Cupps, Jakai Newton, Sisley and others it recognized as potentially good fits who might develop across multiple years in college. But beyond them it has consistently prioritized either high-end prep prospects or the portal, the undercurrent suggestion being Indiana wants talent that’s ready right away.
The counterargument, consistently, is that this is a dangerous strategy. That Woodson had better nail his portal recruiting, or else. But when is that not the case? Any roster-building strategy comes with risks. There’s no endgame to any of this that essentially boils down to “this is so good the games don’t actually matter,” and the idea of basing a roster on robust NIL support used to recruit high-profile transfers is just as valid of a way to fill your locker room as any in modern college basketball.
It will come with the warning that portal recruits tend to have a shorter shelf life in college, and that’s true in the most basic sense. Just this spring and summer, Indiana added four players from the portal — Oumar Ballo, Luke Goode, Langdon Hatton and Dallas James — scheduled to exhaust their eligibility after the coming season.
Yet in the modern climate, should coaches seriously consider any player on anything more than a year-to-year basis? You’re always re-recruiting your roster, and no one is ever absolutely guaranteed not to consider the portal.
Losing Mullins on Wednesday deals a blow to Woodson’s plan for next season’s roster. Just as losing Boogie Fland did a year ago, or Liam McNeeley last spring. And in their places, the Hoosiers added a McDonald’s All American and, yes, from the portal, the Pac-12 Freshman of the Year. There’s every chance someone just as promising will fill the hole Mullins’ commitment to UConn now leaves.
It’s still up to Woodson and his staff to make the plan work, whatever it is. This time, it’s likely they’ll gear back up for another trip through the transfer portal next spring. It won’t be a desperate play, just an embrace of modern roster building in college basketball.
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