Here’s how transfer portal season will work for Mark Pope and Kentucky this year
With Kentucky’s 2025-26 basketball season finished, the focus turns to the future.
That means trying to figure out who will be leaving Mark Pope’s program, who will be sticking around for another year in Lexington and who might be joining for next season.
And that means transfer portal watch has begun.
There are 11 players from the current roster who could realistically return for UK’s 2026-27 campaign — seniors Otega Oweh and Denzel Aberdeen, plus expected NBA draft pick Jayden Quaintance, will be gone — but not all of them will come back to the team for another run.
No matter what happens with those stay-or-go decisions, Pope and the UK coaching staff are expected to hit the transfer portal hard in the coming weeks in a search for more top-end talent — and likely some additional role players and high-upside additions — as they try to build a legitimate Final Four contender for Year 3 of the Pope era.
There are some new rules and wrinkles to know as Kentucky begins its latest talent search.
One big change this year affects the transfer calendar itself.
Last year, the portal opened the day after the second round of the NCAA Tournament wrapped up, causing a mad scramble for teams still playing basketball. Kam Williams, for instance, committed to UK on the morning of the Cats’ Sweet 16 loss to Tennessee, with Pope — and other coaches in his position — acknowledging that they had to juggle March Madness game-planning with roster-building for the following season.
This year, the portal won’t officially open until April 7, the day after the national championship game. The portal will also remain open for only two weeks, closing for new entrants April 21.
So, any player who wants to transfer schools without penalty for next season must enter his name in the portal between those two dates. Players can make decisions regarding their new school at any point after April 21, but they must officially declare their intentions to transfer by then to be eligible to switch schools without sitting out a season.
That 15-day window has been lowered from 30 days in 2025 (and 45 days in 2024) which should give college coaches more clarity on their own roster situations — and, by extension, what they’ll need out of the portal — in a more timely manner.
But players aren’t waiting until April 7 to make their intentions known.
There have already been dozens of reports from national recruiting services like 247Sports and On3 of Division I players saying they will enter their names in the portal as soon as it opens. That pool will be growing in the coming days, as more teams are eliminated from the NCAA Tournament and the coaching carousel starts to turn at full speed.
College coaches have been keeping tabs on these reports — with even more speculation over potential transfers being thrown around behind the scenes in the sport — and staffs at places like Kentucky will approach that April 7 date with a good idea of which players might be available.
Since college programs won’t be able to formally add transfers until the portal officially opens, it will give those coaching staffs a little more time to vet those potential additions. Kentucky is expected to get some more help for that process soon.
Kentucky in the transfer portal
UK will be adding to its support staff this offseason, and the first new job expected to be filled is a “player development” role with duties similar to those of the “general manager” position that has become popular at other major programs.
Pope explained that this particular position, which he made clear to the Herald-Leader that he expects to fill before the portal opens, will have an integral role in helping the coaching staff identify roster additions for the 2026-27 season and beyond.
“It’s really important to have somebody that, literally — 24 hours a day, seven days a week — is going to be just war gaming and modeling over and over and over again,” Pope said. “And so we’re excited about filling that position. It’s going to really help us, as a staff, collect information.”
The job listing for the position has officially closed, and a hire is expected to be announced soon. And with so many specific players already declaring their intent to enter the portal when it opens April 7, the UK staff can spend the next two weeks evaluating talent behind the scenes.
Something worth noting there is that four of Kentucky’s five assistant coaches — Alvin Brooks III, Mark Fox, Cody Fueger and Jason Hart — are on expiring contracts. And while all four of those coaches will remain with UK in the short term, there is no guarantee that the entire group will be back for next season. Mikhail McLean is the only assistant signed for another year.
It’s also worth noting that the changing financial dynamics of the sport will come into play as Pope builds this third UK roster.
Several players from the 2025-26 team are expected to be back — starters like Collin Chandler, Malachi Moreno and Kam Williams among them — but the expectation in college basketball circles has been that the overall team “payrolls” next season will be lower than they were this season.
For the 2025-26 campaign, colleges were basically allowed to circumvent rules on how players are compensated under the NCAA’s new NIL model. There was a window last offseason during which schools could engage in so-called “pay for play” roster-building tactics.
The approval of the House vs. NCAA settlement last year ensured that, moving forward, college players must be engaged in legitimate NIL endeavors to be compensated outside of a school’s revenue-sharing pool of a little more than $20 million for all sports.
The Herald-Leader was told last preseason that the cost of UK’s roster was around $22 million, which was thought to be the highest payroll in college basketball, though several other schools topped $10 million and some went beyond the $15 million threshold.
Inflated payrolls like that are, presumably, a thing of the past with these new compensation rules in place, though player agents will still be trying to get the best deals possible for their clients, and that could complicate the market as teams try to figure out how much to offer.
The changing financial landscape will also mean that Kentucky likely can’t afford to bring everyone back from this team and add the high-end talent necessary to be national title contenders in 2027.
Even with Oweh, Aberdeen and Quaintance — collectively, a sizable chunk of this past season’s payroll — moving on, some current players who don’t fit UK’s future vision (or simply want to move on of their own volition) will be able to command bigger paydays elsewhere.
Changes in UK recruiting
All of these changes will make for a hectic few weeks in the Kentucky coaches’ office.
The Cats could also add players from places other than the transfer portal.
The traditional high school recruiting route remains a possibility, though nearly all of the five-star recruits in the 2026 class are already spoken for. It’s possible that there could be some high-profile decommitments in the coming days — as high-major coaches start changing jobs — and No. 1 overall recruit Tyran Stokes, a longtime Pope target, remains available and on UK’s board. But there are no prep players who are clearly leaning toward Lexington at the moment.
This season also saw a wave of G League players attempt to come back to college basketball (or enter the level for the first time after skipping college for the pros out of high school).
Pope has been keeping an eye on some of these possibilities, even traveling late in the season to see high-upside G League option Dink Pate, a 6-foot-8 guard who turned 20 years old earlier this month and has expressed interest in coming to Kentucky.
“You have potential avenues in every level of sport right now for recruiting,” Pope, who cannot comment on specific recruits, told the Herald-Leader shortly after that visit. “It’s just new. And in some of that, you don’t even know exactly how it’s going to pan out, but everywhere that the NCAA declares is legal for us to recruit, we’ll explore in depth. I’m not trying to go rewrite any rules, but whatever rules there are, we’ll play in that space.”
Each of these players will be evaluated by the NCAA for eligibility purposes on a case-by-case basis, but some who never played college basketball, including Pate, are expected to be cleared.
The international route will also remain an option.
UK plucked Andrija Jelavic from a Serbian pro team last year, and programs like Sweet 16 participant Illinois have had ample success going that direction in recent years.
“Your recruiting board becomes so massively expansive, especially because things happen so fast,” Pope said. “And so there’s a ton of speculation about possibilities that you’re trying to take in in real time, just so you have at least done a bunch of war gaming. So that’s what you do: a bunch of war gaming, thinking through a thousand different scenarios, so that when you get to it, you can kind of be as close to it as you can. There’s a lot of dynamics that go into that.”
It’ll be a lot to keep straight in the coming weeks. And Kentucky’s coaches are already in the thick of it, pivoting immediately to roster-building efforts for next season following the NCAA Tournament loss to Iowa State on Sunday.
The day before that defeat, Pope was asked if his approach to building rosters would be impacted by the national college basketball trend of athletics directors and major donors demanding immediate results in exchange for the increase in financial resources.
Pope, who is signed to be Kentucky’s coach for four more seasons, will be working for a new AD soon, with Mitch Barnhart’s recent announcement that he will retire this summer. The UK coach explained that, whoever his boss is a year from now — and no matter what else is happening elsewhere in college basketball — the pressure to get great players and advance far in the NCAA Tournament will always be high in Lexington.
“Clearly I can’t speak for any other program. I don’t know if that change has had anything to do with the way we’re trying to do it here,” he said. “Our assignment and expectation is to win at the highest level every single year, to do everything we can to do that. So we’re always thinking long-term and we’re always very focused on the exact moment that we’re in right now.
“I don’t think that those things have changed that at all.”
Plenty else to do with roster construction is changing. And the work to put the Cats in a better position to compete for a championship in 2027 has already begun.
