How Much Has the Transfer Portal Impacted Cowboy Basketball?

LARAMIE -- Cort Roberson truly is a unicorn.

The 6-foot, 160-pound guard, who appeared in just 16 games during his four-year career at Wyoming, witnessed 34 teammates leave the program via the NCAA Transfer Portal.

Hat tip to Hunter Maldonado and Hunter Thompson for staying put, too. Both played their entire career in Laramie.

These three are a dying breed.

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Since that database opened back in October of 2018, 40 players in total have bolted for one reason or another, including nine after a forgettable 2022-23 campaign that saw Jeff Linder's Cowboys win just nine games.

That, of course, came on the heels of an at-large bid to the NCAA Tournament, where Wyoming fell to Indiana in the First Four in Dayton.

The core of that group returned, including ballyhooed big man Graham Ike. Linder also added PAC-12 transfers Max Agbonkpolo and Ethan Anderson from USC and snagged Jake Kyman across town at UCLA. That trio was supposed to bolster a lineup that already included Maldonado, Xavier DuSell and Jeremiah Oden, among others.

That never materialized.

The Cowboys managed just four conference victories after being voted second in the preseason Mountain West polls.

Ike, who was also named the league's presumptive player of the year, never saw the floor that winter, dealing with a nagging foot injury. The PAC-3 abruptly left the team in early February. Noah Reynolds dealt with concussion issues and was sidelined for the final nine games of the season. Brendan Wenzel and Kenny Foster also battled various ailments. Kyman and Maldonado also missed time.

Linder's response to that debacle was to add three graduate transfers -- Sam Griffin, Akuel Kot and Mason Walters -- who each had just one season of eligibility remaining.

While that threesome led the team in scoring, respectively, the following year, they were on campus for just a handful of months.

"Our fan base is not going to embrace it," Wyoming Athletics Director Tom Burman said back in March of '23, just days after the Cowboys were bounced in the opening round of the Mountain West Tournament. "They'd like to watch kids grow up a little bit. One-year wonders just aren't going to work, in my opinion. I'm hoping that we get high school kids and we can keep them for a while or for their duration, and we get transfers who have two years of eligibility so we can watch them grow up a little bit.

"We may get one or two, but last year's team, nobody knew who they were until February."

The portal entries kept coming, too.

Caden Powell, Jacob Theodosiou, Jonas Sirtautas and Wenzel all left, following that meltdown against Fresno State in Las Vegas. Burman said he didn't expect any additional departures. So, naturally, two of the brightest young stars -- freshman forward Cam Manyawu and rookie guard Kael Combs -- announced they were hitting the open market.

No one knew it at the time, but even Linder himself was eying a move, which eventually happened last May. He signed with Texas Tech, becoming an assistant under Grant McCasland.

Incoming freshmen Dylan Warlick, Oliver Faubert and Dominic Pagonis changed their minds. So did transfers Tyree Ihenacho and Yuto Yamanouchi-Williams, who landed at Washington and Portland, respectively.

Just three days later, Sundance Wicks, a Gillette native and former assistant under Linder, was named the new head coach after leading Green Bay to an 18-win season and being named the Horizon League Coach of the Year.

He had a massive rebuild ahead with just four players remaining on the current roster, including Roberson. Wicks pieced together a lineup in less than a month, adding seniors Obi Agbim (who also briefly re-entered the portal after Linder left for Lubbock), Jordan Nesbitt, Dontaie Allen, Cole Henry and Touko Tainamo.

Wyoming won just 12 games during Wicks' initial season on the sidelines.

Now, once again, his marching orders are to find the right nucleus of players for this once-proud program that has finished near the bottom of the conference standings as teams like San Diego State, Boise State and Utah State, among others, have continued to thrive in the era of Name, Image and Likeness.

"Partially, that falls on us as our fanbase," Burman continued during that interview last March, referring to NIL. "We're going to have to help football and basketball the next few years and figure out a way to generate the revenue to do this. People hate to hear that but that's this world we live in 2024. That is what it is. We have to get more talented to get in the upper half of this league."

Six players have already hit free agency this spring, including Agbim, who led the Pokes in scoring, pouring in nearly 18 points per night. It was supposed to be his final collegiate season. That is until a temporary waiver was introduced in January, granting seniors who started their career at the junior college level an additional year of eligibility. He is now a Baylor Bear.

Bigs Oleg Kojenets and Scottie Ebube are gone. So are guards AJ Wills, Nigle Cook and Levi Brown. Only forwards Abou Magassa and Matija Belic remain.

Wicks has inked three freshmen: Forwards Gavin Gores (6'10", 210, Cumberland, Wisconsin) and Neil Summers (6'9", 240, Laramie, Wyo.) and guard Nasir Meyer (6'7", 185, Los Angeles, Calif.).

Freshman walk-on Garrett Spielman of Sheridan is also currently on the roster.

Last week, Buddy Hammer, a 6-foot-7 junior forward who spent the previous season at Northeastern Oklahoma A&M College, committed to Wicks and Co. So did Texas A&M-Corpus Christi guard Damarion Dennis.

That's a start, but there's still a tough row to hoe.

The current transfer portal window is open until April 22.