Mommy, why we can’t have nice things?
It’s Admissions, darling. Those mean people in Admissions.
Full disclosure. I’d love it if Duke could lessen Kyle Filipowski’s burden with a twitchy, seven-foot, future lottery-pick rim protector.
Come on down.
But Duke doesn’t have one. Not many college teams do.
A sizeable portion of the Duke fan base thinks that’s because Duke has set up impossible barriers to bringing in under-grad transfers.
Is it harder to get transfer credits accepted to Duke, basketball players or otherwise? Sure. And I’m okay with that. This is Duke we’re talking about, not the local community college. But darn near every Duke coach not named Jon Scheyer has successfully navigated that path. So, there’s something else going on here.
Let’s reprise. Since the institution of the transfer portal, Duke men’s basketball’s only transfers have been of the grad-student variety, Patrick Tape, Theo John, Bates Jones, Ryan Young, Jacob Grandison, Kale Catchings.
None this year. No one left by the portal, no one came in by the portal.
Which didn’t leave a lot of available scholarships.
Duke has a four-player freshman class. But remember it was a five-player class until Mackenzie Mgbako bailed.
Now Mgbako is 6-8, 215 and no rim protector. He has three blocks through 20 games for Indiana. But he was one of three front-court recruits in a program with a bit of a scholarship crunch. Duke knew Derek Lively III and Dariq Whitehead were going NBA but they had to leave open scholarships for Jeremy Roach, Filipowski, Tyrese Proctor and Mark Mitchell, all of whom eventually returned.
Which means Duke had 13 allocated scholarships until Mgbako jumped ship in the middle of May, too late for any useful prep seniors to still be available.
But there were big men in the portal over the summer and Duke had one available scholarship.
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