MAC MBB Portal Update

 According to Verbal Commits, there are 746 players in the portal throughout D1.  For the MAC, as of 5;20 PM on Monday, I make it 41 MAC players in the portal....enough for three teams worth of scholarships.

Only a couple of them have found homes...Kevin Miller, who was All-MAC FR and missed almost all of this season with injuries, has landed at Wake Forest.

To date, here is the breakdown by team....

• Akron 3
• Ball State 4
• Bowling Green 6
• Buffalo 5
• CMU 7
• Kent 1
• Miami 6
• NIU 1
• UT 5
• WMU 3

NONE:  EMU and Ohio

BG and Buffalo have coaching changes, so there is usually a lot of portal activity.  The surprises are CMU and Miami.  Miami's coach just finished his first year and CMU's coach finished his second. UT always loses guys because Kowalcyk plays a really tight rotation and if you're not in it, you're never going to play until the last minute of the game.

To be clear, most of these players were not impact players. Some where, but most were not.

For example, only 4 had received MAC recognition of one sort or another

• Payton Sparks                         Ball State       All-MAC 2nd Team
• Curtis Jones         Buffalo                    Third-team all-MAC
• Reggie Bass                            Central Michigan    MAC FR Of Year
• Kevin Miller                           Central Michigan All-MAC FR, injured this year

Only 7 of the 41 were what I would consider good players, meaning they were not MAC recognized but averaged 10 PPG or RPG or in that neighborhood.

• Luke Bumbalough                            Ball State           11 PPG two years ago
• Rashaun Agee                                   Bowling Green         9.9 PPG, 5.7 RPG
• Kaden Metheny                                Bowling Green     10.7 PPG
• Yazid Powell                                    Buffalo                   13 PPG, 4 RPG
• Jesse Zarzuela                                  Central Michigan     16.3 PPG
• Kaleb Thornton  NIU             Made 46 starts, 8 ppg
• Markeese Hastings WMU             8.3 PPG, 9.3 RLP

The remaining 30 players were either role players (in the 6 PPG range) or players that made little or no contribution to the team. There are 20 players in this last category.  That doesn't mean those guys never would have been good players, had they stayed to develop, but they are going to try and develop elsewhere.  In the meantime, for at least 20 of these roster slots, teams have lost someone they weren't playing anyway and have a chance to fill the slot.

It's a crazy world. My guess is the D1 total might hit 1,000.