On Tuesday, three players from Troy University’s basketball team – Theo Seng, Kerrington Kiel and Thomas Dowd – spoke to the Troy Rotary Club and gave their perspective on the transfer portal and Name, Image and Likeness agreements.

In March, Troy won the Sun Belt Conference Championship and earned an automatic berth in the NCAA Tournament. It was only Troy’s third appearance in the tournament. The Trojans fell to Kentucky 76-57 in the first round.

After the season ended, Jackson Fields, Myles Rigsby, Marcus Rigsby, and Sun Belt Player of the Year Tayton Conerway entered the transfer portal.

The first question the three players fielded was about the transfer portal.

“When you look at it I definitely think it’s very tempting in a sense like you see all these guys leaving, getting money and whatnot and I think that’s probably the main driving factor in it,” Dowd said. “There’s so many kids going into it and tons of kids you know looking for opportunities and whatnot. I think I can speak for Theo and Kerrigan that we think we can really build something here at Troy.”

Kiel said the transfer portal and NIL had changed the college landscape and those changes had a big impact on the decision-making process of the players.

“I honestly think the transfer portal has, I’m not going to say it’s taken away from college athletics, but, you know, it has changed the aspect of college sports,” Kiel said. “You would say, as a student athlete, you’re not, originally, five, 10 years ago, you’re not going to college to get paid, going to college to grow your brand. So now I think that it’s just a different, it’s a different landscape of things because you have kids coming from different backgrounds, you know, so now that they’re 19, 20, 21 years old, they don’t have to wait if they’re not as good to go jump straight into the league, that now they can go, you know, potentially pay for their family.

“Like, some of our guys, they’re getting a lot of money, and they come from some pretty bad backgrounds. So, you know, it’s hard to just say, hey, I want you to stay here because you’re my teammate, but I know some of their backgrounds, so, you know, like, I’m not upset.”

Seng said the transfer portal had changed the game for both players and coaches.

“The portal kind of makes it really hard for teams and coaches to build like a culture, you know?” Seng said. “You know, guys are bouncing and they’re there for a year. A lot of the high major teams are recruiting 15 new guys right now, but we were blessed to have guys coming back. And I think that was a big reason why we ended up winning the championship this year. We had one guy leave who didn’t play very much, so we have all our key pieces coming back. So with 11 guys coming back this year, I think we can, you know, really make something happen this year and maybe win a game and a tournament this year.”

All three players agreed that agents and the NIL fueled the transfer portal.

“[Agents] will contact you through like, I mean, social media, really Twitter, Instagram, things like that,” Dowd said. “And, you know, obviously, there’s a, like, a lot of guys already have it in their minds that they think they might want to transfer. But, I mean, I think the agents definitely have a big play in that as well, just getting them contacted with other schools and whatnot and kids building themselves up as their own brand.”

Players were asked if they thought some restrictions needed to be placed on the NIL.

“I definitely think that we should kind of tame it a little bit,” Kiel said. “You have some schools, say, for instance Auburn. Their whole starting five is making six, seven figures. So it’s kind of easier for those guys to go recruit people that play at a higher level

because they say, ‘Hey, if you come play for me, I can pay you a million dollars in one year.’

“So, I just feel like it’s kind of taking away from college athletics as a whole. Especially with the transfer portal, it’s weird now because you can transfer and go play immediately. It used to be: you transfer, you had to sit out, you know. So now all these guys, they say, ‘Okay, we can give you seven figures. Come play for me for one year.’

Now it’s just going and going and going. And at the rate it’s going, I feel like it’s not even college athletics … It’s going to turn into a professional sport because everybody is getting paid.”

Dowd said something had to be done to ratchet back the money being thrown around in college basketball.

“It kind of goes back to what Kerrington was saying about how there are situations where you do understand why a guy might want to or need to transfer for, you know, personal reasons or things like that,” Dowd said. “But I definitely think there needs to be some sort of … guardrails would probably be a good idea.

“Because, you know, people even this March Madness were talking about how you’re probably going to [be] seeing upsets less and less. Because it used to be that these mid-major teams were groups of guys who had been together for four years.

They might not have had the talent over the bigger schools, but they had the chemistry and the togetherness.

“And, you know, now that the transfer portal is so open and there’s so much money being thrown around, it’s kind of like, you know, you have a good team for one year. And then those best players get picked off of that team to go to the bigger schools with more talent and more money.

“I think the integrity of college basketball is getting tested a little bit. But I think, you know, now that NIL is a thing, I mean, it’s going to be there to stay. There’s just something that has to be figured out to kind of tame it a little bit.”