Darian DeVries was hired as Indiana's head basketball coach in March 2025, inheriting a program that had just fired Mike Woodson after a disappointing stretch that failed to meet the standard set by Bob Knight and Tom Crean before him. DeVries arrived from West Virginia with a reputation as a sharp tactician and a strong recruiter. He inherited a roster of experienced players, several of whom had been recruited by Woodson and had no particular loyalty to the man replacing him. What happened next was both entirely predictable and genuinely staggering.
Every scholarship player left. Mackenzie Mgbako, the former five-star recruit, entered the portal. So did Malik Reneau, Myles Rice, Bryson Tucker, Kanaan Carlyle, and Jakai Newton. Gabe Cupps committed to Ohio State almost immediately. Four seniors graduated. By the time the dust settled, DeVries was standing in Assembly Hall with a coaching staff, a $10 million NIL budget, and literally no players. Not a depleted roster. Not a thin bench. Zero scholarship players.
The Hoosiers had to build an entire Division I basketball team from scratch through the portal, which is roughly the equivalent of opening a restaurant on Monday with no kitchen staff, no menu, and no food — just a building and a checkbook. DeVries managed it, assembling a competitive roster that made the NCAA Tournament, but the experience illustrated a truth about the modern portal that is easy to overlook: it does not just move talent. It can vaporize it. An entire roster, built over years of recruiting and development, can disappear in a two-week window, leaving nothing behind but empty lockers and scholarship money with nobody to spend it on.
Indiana lost every scholarship player. Auburn lost its entire starting five from the No. 1 seed. NC State has been gutted twice in two years.
Oregon: The Cascade Effect
Oregon is experiencing a slower version of the same phenomenon. Jackson Shelstad — the program's best player, a hometown kid from West Linn who grew up dreaming of wearing green and yellow — entered the portal after a hand injury limited him to 12 games in a 12-20 season. The day before, Kwame Evans Jr., a former McDonald's All-American, had already entered. Then Dezdrick Lindsay followed. Nate Bittle declared for the NBA Draft.
Dana Altman has coached Oregon for 14 seasons and built the program into a consistent NCAA Tournament contender, but he is now facing a reconstruction project at 67 that would challenge a coach half his age. The players he developed are leaving not because they don't respect him, but because a 12-20 season changed the calculus for everyone. Staying on a sinking ship is an act of loyalty that the portal has made economically irrational. Shelstad can earn $2-3 million at Kentucky or Gonzaga. Evans can find a winning program. Altman is left to recruit replacements from the same portal that just swallowed his roster.
Auburn: When Even the No. 1 Seed Can't Hold It Together
The most jarring example did not happen to a losing program. It happened to the best team in the country.
Auburn earned the No. 1 overall seed in the 2026 NCAA Tournament after a dominant SEC season under Bruce Pearl, then Pearl retired and his son Steven took over. The transition was supposed to be smooth — a succession plan within the family. But the portal does not care about succession plans. Auburn lost its entire starting five. Every player who had built the No. 1 seed decided that the program under Steven Pearl was a different proposition than the program under Bruce Pearl, and they exercised their right to leave.
The roster that won the SEC and earned a No. 1 seed simply ceased to exist. Steven Pearl is building from scratch with his father's reputation, his father's facilities, and none of his father's players. The irony is brutal: Auburn's NIL program is among the strongest in the SEC, and the money that was supposed to provide stability became meaningless once the coaching change triggered a mass exodus. You cannot retain players with money alone when the relationship that brought them to campus no longer exists.
NC State: Gutted Twice in Two Years
NC State's situation is the cruelest variation on this theme, because the Wolfpack did not lose their roster once — they lost it twice, under two different coaches, in consecutive offseasons.
When Kevin Keatts was fired after the 2024-25 season, the roster hemorrhaged. Marcus Hill went to Texas A&M. Mike James went to Vanderbilt. Ismael Diouf went to Northern Iowa. Will Wade was hired to replace Keatts and spent the spring rebuilding almost entirely through the portal, assembling a team of players who had no connection to NC State beyond Wade's recruiting pitch.
That team went 20-14, lost 8 of its last 10 games, and then Wade left for LSU via his agent's email. The players he recruited are now facing the same question the Keatts-era players faced a year ago: stay for a coach they have never met, or enter the portal and start over. Paul McNeil, whom Wade personally convinced to stay, has "the right to feel betrayed." The portal opens April 7 and NC State still does not have a head coach. Two coaching changes. Two roster exoduses. Two years.
The Structural Problem Nobody Can Fix
The common thread connecting Indiana, Oregon, Auburn, and NC State is not coaching failure or player disloyalty. It is the fundamental architecture of the modern transfer portal: when the relationship between a player and a program is mediated primarily by the coach who recruited him, any coaching change becomes a potential extinction event for the roster.
Revenue sharing was supposed to mitigate this by giving programs an institutional financial tool to retain players independent of coaching changes. In theory, a player on a two-year revenue-sharing contract has a financial reason to stay even if the coach leaves. In practice, the early evidence suggests that financial incentives are not strong enough to override the relational bond — or the lack of one — between a player and the new coaching staff. Indiana offered money. The players left anyway. Auburn has SEC-level NIL resources. The starting five still walked.
The portal has created a system where the most valuable asset a program possesses — its roster — can be liquidated in days by a single personnel decision in the athletic director's office. Coaches come and go, and when they go, they take the relationships that hold rosters together. What remains is a building, a budget, and a brand. For programs like Indiana and Auburn, the brand is strong enough to attract replacements. For programs like NC State, which has now churned through two complete rosters in two years, the brand is beginning to erode under the weight of instability.
The portal was built to give players freedom. It has done that. But freedom without continuity produces a sport where the average roster has a shelf life of one season, where player development is replaced by player acquisition, and where the programs that win are not the ones that build the best teams — they are the ones that rebuild the fastest.