Transfer Portal Day 8 Update: Big Domino in Big Blue Nation

Credit: Rob Gray-Imagn Images

By Chris Marler

The dominoes are starting to fall around the country for some of the biggest names in the college basketball transfer portal. With less than a week before it closes, here’s the latest.

By the Numbers

For the third consecutive day we saw the most commitments of any day since the portal opened. Monday saw 57 players commit to a new school giving a new total of 170 since the portal first opened. That’s still just 15.8 percent of the players in the portal as a whole which now stands at 1,077.

Kentucky’s newest investment

The first big star to find an SEC home happened Monday afternoon as former BYU point guard Rob Wright committed to Kentucky. Wright had a phenomenal season at BYU and will now take his 18.1 ppg and 4.6 assists per game to play in Mark Pope’s offense in Lexington. Kentucky’s annual roster turnover is nothing new, and fans have been familiar with one year overhauls for over a decade now thanks to how John Calipari ran things during his tenure. The key for this Kentucky team in year three of the Mark Pope era will be how much more bang for their buck can they get with this year’s class versus last year’s that saw the Cats spend a nation leading $22 million in NIL.

NEW: BYU star PG Rob Wright plans to enter the NCAA transfer portal, @GoodmanHoops reports.https://t.co/M9PuKIHQS3 pic.twitter.com/0nkM2HGwLU

— On3 (@On3) April 8, 2026

The Up and Down of the SEC

We’ve mentioned the slow and sluggish start for SEC teams in the portal multiple times since the portal opened. That continues to be the case even though several teams have received commitments in the last few days. The star power though? That is lacking as is the sheer volume of new players coming in.

As of Tuesday ten schools have received at least one portal commitment. Only three of those schools however, have received more than one. That’s just 14 players in a 16 team league and includes six teams in the conference without a single player from the portal. One of those six schools is LSU who was very vocal about their intention to spend in this year’s portal cycle. That hasn’t begun as of yet.

Again, the lack of star power is also very surprising, as only five players in the current top 50 player rankings on On3 are committed to SEC schools, and two of those five are to the same school, Texas.