Another wacky season of Who Wants to Be a College Millionaire approached the finish line last week with the closing of the basketball transfer portal. All that remains are the final moves of the estimated 4,400 Division I players seeking more playing time, a better environment and, most of all these days, more money.
And it’s not just basketball players dribbling for dollars. Last winter, 6,700 football players entered their portal, according to the NCAA. They, too, were chasing big bucks.
“Student-athletes?” Are you kidding? Some football players in the Power Four conferences are earning seven-figure incomes, and if they want a raise, they move to another campus.
Basketball players in the Big East and elsewhere are doing okay thanks to Name, Image and Likeness deals supplemented by revenue sharing. Multiple reports put the basketball payroll at Providence College at $10 million last season with an increase to $12 million for 2026-27 under new coach Bryan Hodgson.
Hodgson and other coaches are pushing beyond the traditional boundaries of college recruiting. He has signed a pair of professionals: Dink Pate, a three-year veteran of the NBA G League, where the standard minimum is $45,000 per season and a two-way deal that allows switching back and forth to the NBA is $578,000; and Leonardo Marangon, who has played three seasons in Italy’s Serie 2, one step below the Italian big time.
URI signed Lithuanian forward Matas Deniausas last week. He played pro ball at home in 2024.
No big deal, though. College football and basketball rosters are loaded with professionals now. They change schools as often as President Trump changes his mind. Activity in the portal has provided the Providence Journal’s Bill Koch with enough material for weekly updates.
From the University of Michigan’s $10 million championship basketball roster to college football players competing for multiple programs over 5, 6 – even 9 years of eligibility in the case of Montana linebacker Solomon Tuliaupupu – the NIL-revenue sharing-transfer portal era of college athletics is not ending any time soon, if ever.
But one Rhode Island football coach is navigating away from the big spending required to mine the transfer portal that has transformed college sports. I spoke to Chris Merritt of Bryant just before the Super Bowl, when he should have been planning for spring practice. Instead, he was, as he put it, speed dating in the portal.
“This is the first time in 30 years I didn’t call plays, and it’s because I’m being forced to do a part of my job that I never thought I would be in. You know, right now I would be spending my time reviewing season film and making adjustments and changes for spring football and all the Xs and Os and those things. But what I’m doing instead of that is looking at legal documents from revenue share agreements and spending more time on Excel than I am on film,” he told me.
“And then on roster management because when you turn over 40 percent of your roster every year, you know you’re starting from scratch. You have to re-establish everything. So, you know, we’re knee-deep in trying to re-establish our culture of what we feel is successful,” he said.
To do so, Merritt and his staff are returning to high school.
“What we’ve decided here, after some trial and error in the portal, is to build this program from the ground up, and we’re going to do it through recruiting high-school kids. The reality is we’re getting better kids out of high school now because of better quality players available to us because the Boston Colleges of the world aren’t taking as many high-school kids. So, we’re getting a better high-school kid, and it’s easier to hold on to them than it is to try to find one in the portal because when you invest your time in them, the culture of your program, you have to hope that 60 percent is going to be louder than the 40 percent that comes in. And so you’re kind of really relying on that piece,” he said.
This is Bryant’s second recruiting class focused on high-school players. Eighteen from the prep ranks are heading to Smithfield. Merritt added 15 transfers in January.
“The problem with the transfer portal is that it tells you a kid is in there. It doesn’t tell you why he’s in there. We feel when we recruit a high-school kid, we’ve got more of an ability to really kind of research their background and to get to know the kids a lot better. You know, speed dating is about as best a description you could have when it comes to portal recruiting because you only get about a week to get to know the kid. And if you miss, well it’s the old Trojan horse. You have to be careful what you bring in,” he said.
“Any time there’s a young man that leaves our program in the portal in his first or second year, we’ll replace him with a high-school kid. But if he’s a junior or senior, we have to really look at utilizing the portal because if we keep replacing the older guys who leave the program before they graduate with high-school kids we’re going to have a team of 19-year olds, and that’s not good, either. so, I think if we keep those numbers down and we’re bringing in seven, eight max, per year, we tell them it’s your job to conform to us; it’s not our job to conform to you. They become a positive part of our program that way.”
Then Merritt described perfectly what has become of mid-major football programs like Bryant.
“We’re really just junior colleges now for the Power 4. We live in a world where at any time anybody can come in and take your best player and hand you a bill to replace them,” he said.
A great example: When quarterback Cam Ward left Washington State for the University of Miami in 2024, Washington State had to replace him.
“And they did that by taking my quarterback,” Merritt said.
Zevi Eckhaus broke passing records and earned all conference recognition in his three seasons at Bryant. He entered the transfer portal after the 2023 season, committed to Jacksonville State, withdrew his commitment and committed to Washington State. He appeared in two games in 2024 and became the starter early in the 2025 season.
“We had to spend $17,000 to court, date and recruit five college transfer portal quarterbacks because you just can’t put yourself in a spot where you have to play the next kid up, who was a freshman, and just put them in there.”
Merritt envies NFL coaches.
“I’m jealous of the NFL because they have contracts and agreements. It’s not a free-for-all every six months. I’m jealous of the Ivies because that’s like the last stronghold of what college football was meant to be.”
Coincidentally, Grace Calhoun, Brown’s athletics director, is in Washington, D.C., this week to support the Ivy League’s position on proposed legislation relating to college athletics. President Trump entered the arena recently by forming a commission to study multiple college sports issues. He also issued an executive order placing limits on college athletics such as one unrestricted transfer and five years of eligibility, although lawyers told ESPN it’s likely that order would be struck down if challenged in court.
College coaching is managing now, Merritt said, and he sees a reckoning coming.
“Even if that means knocking us back in the dark ages of scholastic ball, let the powerful break away and do what they want. They can be as ruthless and renegade as they want, but at our level it needs to be scholastic based and get back to developing kids.”
Oswin Erhunmwunse, Providence College’s center until April 8, put it this way while announcing his transfer to Big East rival Creighton:
“It’s sad it has come to this,” he said, “but it’s part of the business.”
