Recruit now, win in four.
Since the dawn of college basketball — college athletics in general, really — that was the mantra. Coaches recruited players out of high school under the assumption that they’d have four years to mold them into better players, better individuals, better winners, all while the athlete donned the same colors from their first practice to walking the stage at graduation.
To some degree, that had to have been Bill Coen’s vision in the summer of 2022. He went out and signed six incoming freshmen to usher in the next era of Northeastern basketball; some of them heralded, some less so. Yes, that summer was unlikely to pay immediate dividends, but if you give a basketball mind like Coen four years to coach this group? The ceiling, as they say, was the roof…
Chase Cormier, Jared Turner, Harold Woods, Masai Troutman, Rashad King, and Collin Metcalf made up the hexad. Two guards, two wings, and two forwards — a class balance one could only dream of.
Three years later, all that’s left from that vaunted Class of ‘26 is… well, nobody. (I’m still here, I guess, but it’s hard to picture just how that’ll help the team on the court.) All six men have either found new homes as transfers or have officially entered the transfer portal, bidding farewell to Matthews Arena in order to chase a higher level of competition, a different role, better NIL compensation, move closer to home, or some combination of each.
It’s a talented sextet, no doubt. Cormier shipped off to Wofford after his freshman campaign, while Turner mysteriously left the team prior to his junior season before announcing his commitment to Old Dominion this March. Woods, Troutman, King, and Metcalf all announced their intent to leave in the past week, so the jury’s still out, but at least two (King and Troutman) ought to end up in a power conference while Woods and Metcalf figure to make at least a slight step up.
What does Northeastern have to show for it, you might ask? Outside of King’s First Team All-CAA award — nothing. All that talent netted them the following: 39 wins, 55 losses, and three CAA Tournament first-round exits in three years.
Isn’t pretty, is it?
Fifteen years ago, Coen would’ve had one more go with at least some of this bunch, if not all of it. In that reality, the 2022-23 campaign could be thrown away. In that reality, it’d be reasonable to struggle through a 2023-24 season where older players blocked some key pathways, and an underwhelming, injury-plagued 2024-25 would be forgettable, because senior year is the ultimate payoff, and that’d be on deck.
That’s no longer the case. Across the country, things have changed. Schools of all shapes and sizes are hemorrhaging players in the transfer portal. This year, 700 men’s basketball players entered the portal on day one, smashing the record set a year ago, a number that smashed the high-water mark set a year before that. It is, to put it simply, a different game.
Whether you agree with it, find it offensively immoral, or anything in between, this style of college athletics is here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future. With the lawsuit-stricken NCAA unable to enforce any of its own rules, it’s unlikely we see any real guardrails installed any time soon, and individual conferences are powerless to do anything. The age of collegiate free agency is in full swing.
For the Huskies, we’ll call the last five years a honeymoon period. A global pandemic coupling with the biggest rule change in the history of college athletics is enough reason to give any program that isn’t a blue blood some grace. That’s fine.
That period is over.
As one stares at the Huskies’ barren roster and relives the respective bitter finishes to each of the last four seasons, that much is evident. Now, it’s time for Northeastern to adapt.
No, I don’t have a concrete answer as to how, and anyone who claims to is lying. There is no right or wrong answer in a landscape that seems to shift every few weeks.
I can promise, though, that a solution involves a number of different things. They’ll have to get sharper in their recruitment, sharper in the transfer portal, and more adept at in-house development. They may have to adopt a new on-court identity, like a full-court press or three-heavy offense, just to make up for talent gaps as the big boys continue to spend millions and millions of dollars on their rosters.
And, to cap it off, they’ll need funding. Yesterday’s game is not today’s game, and yesterday’s price is not today’s price. Northeastern doesn’t have to be the New York Yankees, but they can’t be the Pittsburgh Pirates either, not if they’d like to win some basketball games.
Northeastern’s administration understands those challenges and the shifting landscape, but it’s unclear how much is truly being done about it. In an interview with WRBB Sports back in December, Athletic Director Jim Madigan said that the school brought in “a couple hundred thousand” in NIL funds for men’s basketball this past year. Madigan also offered this:
“We’ve had some basketball players here for a couple years, and then they move on. And people always say, ‘Well, hey, we need a guard for basketball. Yeah, I know. But one is playing at Michigan State (Tyson Walker), and one’s playing at Butler (Jahmyl Telfort), and you who I’m talking about. And good for them.”
“That old model is done. It might not be a cup of tea or the appetite of everyone, but there’s going to be more people getting into that [NIL] space. Because if you want us to be successful, we need to be in that space.”
If they don’t enter that space, and nothing changes? It’ll be hard to see how Northeastern works themselves back into basketball relevancy. And that’d be a hell of a shame.