There is no offseason in college basketball, especially not in the NIL and transfer portal era. Nobody knows this better than Wisconsin Basketball head coach Greg Gard — who has essentially had to become a CEO and GM for the Badgers due to how the game has evolved.
“We have become professional sports,” Gard said on a 97.3 The Game radio appearance. “But we don’t have the guidelines of free agency, of salary caps, of players unions, of arbitration. We’re in that world without any guardrails.”
While some of the blue bloods may have been quicker to establish the necessary funding to compete in this NIL landscape, the Badgers have been proactive in their efforts to provide Wisconsin basketball with the resources needed to compete at the highest level. From all indications, their efforts have yielded results.
“My staff and I, led by Coach Krabbenhoft, started this initiative over a year ago of our ‘sixth man society’ as part of the Varsity Collective,” Gard said. “Put a lot of boots on the ground raising funds. We’ve been able to almost triple our NIL collective in terms of men’s basketball in a year.
“We’ve had a lot of generous donors that have stepped up that want to keep us at the forefront, but that’s what it takes.”
To the credit of the Wisconsin basketball program, they’ve traditionally built and retained the core of their roster despite all the transfer portal and NIL madness happening behind the scenes. It’s no secret that teams are coming to poach — and the Badgers have managed to fend off those schools when they’ve come knocking.
For anyone who thinks otherwise, Chucky Hepburn still being the Badgers starting point guard is all the proof you need. Despite numerous attempts to lure him elsewhere, Hepburn remains a cornerstone of the program.
For the sake of building something sustainable, I still think the best route is recruiting, developing, and retaining your own to the best of your ability and then supplementing those core pieces with transfer portal additions.
Overall, the transfer portal has been more of an asset to the Wisconsin basketball program to this point than a hindrance. Look no further than last season’s roster, where AJ Storr, Max Klesmit, and Kamari McGee all played key roles in the Badgers rotation. In most cases, the players left for greener pastures haven’t become world-beaters.
While reports have suggested that Storr, who entered the portal, is targeting $1 million on the open market, a source has shared that the Wisconsin basketball program could feasibly compete in that ballpark, even though it’s not a price tag they’d like to pay on a regular basis.
“We’ve had to do events; I’ve driven to almost every corner of the state to meet with people,” Gard said. “X’ing, O’ing, and drawing out-of-bounds plays is being reduced of what I do almost every day. Right now, it’s a lot of foot to the gas on the NIL world.”
Wisconsin stands firmly among the “haves” rather than the “have-nots” in college basketball, and their dedicated initiatives to enhance NIL funding signal a promising future for Badgers hoops.
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