On this edition of ‘Tales From The Beat’, we take a look at this year’s NCAA women’s basketball transfer class. While there’s been plenty of discussion about individual players and their specific situations, we wanted to look more broadly about what’s happening on a broader level. Is the price of the brick truly going up for women’s basketball players? Is revenue sharing going to have a substantial effect on how programs use the portal? How do reporters manage the onslaught of information leaks from coaches, agents and players?
In order to answer those questions, we talked with one of the top portal newsbreakers in the game: Talia Goodman of On3 Sports. She’s been tasked with growing the recruiting site and its’ presence in women’s basketball. Over the last couple years she’s broken stories of coaching changes, transfer destinations and movement among some of the top players in the nation.
We sit down to discuss some of the movement this year and how NIL money being thrown at high school recruits is resetting the transfer market. We also talked about how positional need is a great influence on who gets what money and how much money we’re talking on some of these offers.
As always, let us know in the comments if you like what you hear, who you’d like to hear from next and what subjects you want to hear from the experts on…
Scroll ahead to hear…
0:00 - Show Introduction
1:15 - Building the ‘insider’ infrastructure in women’s absketball
3:29 - The appetite for breaking news in women’s basketball.
5:55 - How much more ‘wild west’ the portal and tampering has gotten this year.
8:18 - How much Aaliyah Chavez’ NIL deal reset the portal market.
10:09 - How positional need is pushing NIL payouts.
11:45 - Which schools surprised in how much they spent this cycle.
13:27 - The complicated nature of the portal and potential rule changes on the horizon.
14:17 - How to discern which sources are trying to mislead and which are being honest.
16:44 - How a lack of media infrastructure creates worse rumor mills during transfer season.
22:05 - The issue of established agents vs. NIL agent.
24:50 - What to make of the Kiyomi McMiller saga…