Preston Spradlin, then the coach of the Morehead State Eagles, went to scout an Adidas grassroots basketball tournament in Birmingham, Ala., in the spring of 2019. As usual, he arrived with his eyes wide open and head on a swivel.
“A lot of times guys from the big schools just get a list [of highly touted prospects] and go watch the players on that list,” Spradlin says. “At a place like Morehead, you go watch players who aren’t on a list. You’ve got to be zigging when everyone else is zagging.”
Spradlin’s fortuitous zig that weekend led him to lay eyes upon a skinny, 6' 8" rising senior from Florida named Johni Broome. It might not have been love at first sight, but it was intrigue.
“He had great feel for the game and was very competitive,” Spradlin says. “We started recruiting him and he checked every single box.”
The competition to land a player rated the No. 471 prospect in the Class of 2020 by 247 Sports was virtually nonexistent. The Bryant Bulldogs, who were relatively new to Division I and struggling to gain traction, offered a scholarship. So did the Jacksonville Dolphins. That was about it.
Spradlin got Broome to take an October visit to Morehead, an Ohio Valley Conference school in the Appalachian Mountains of eastern Kentucky. He signed a letter of intent with the Eagles a month later. Then Broome had a great senior season, leading Tampa Catholic High School to the state finals, and basketball people finally began to notice him.
“I had coaches calling me from the state tournament saying, ‘What ungodly things did you do to get this kid to go to Morehead State?’ ” Spradlin says with a laugh.
Broome was a career-making steal for Spradlin. After four straight losing seasons to start his Morehead tenure, the Eagles went 23–8 in Broome’s freshman year and made the NCAA tournament. Spradlin has won 20 games every year since then, parlaying success at Morehead into landing the James Madison Dukes job last year.
And today Broome is one of the stars of March Madness, carrying the No. 1 NCAA seed Auburn Tigers into the Sweet 16. After two seasons at Morehead, he’s played three at Auburn, growing to become a 6' 10", 240-pound tower of power who leads the Tigers in scoring (18.4 points), rebounds (10.7), assists (3.0) and blocks (2.2) per game.
Broome’s ascendance is a remarkable success story—but what’s even more remarkable is the fact that he has so much out-of-nowhere company in this Sweet 16. Thirty of the 80 starters on the remaining teams in the tournament came to their current power-conference school from a lower level of Division I.
A sleeper here or there who hits it big? Of course. That’s part of the fabric of college basketball. But somehow, 37.5% of the starting lineups we will watch Thursday and Friday are players who, at some point, big-time programs overlooked, disregarded or demoted. There are no Cinderella teams left, but plenty of Cinderella players in this underdog Sweet 16.
There are standout players who upgraded from Florida International, Saint Peter’s, Longwood, Drexel, Oakland, Campbell, Ohio, North Dakota State and Grand Canyon, among other off-Broadway locales. Special commendation (or condolences) to the Belmont Bruins, who have former players now starting for the Florida Gators, Ole Miss Rebels and Maryland Terrapins. And it’s impossible to ignore the contribution of the last great Cinderella of the Big Dance, the Florida Atlantic Owls—three former stars (and their former coach) are playing vital roles for Florida, the Arkansas Razorbacks and the Michigan Wolverines.
It is a startling change of the landscape when the Kentucky Wildcats, known for decades as a five-star recruiting magnet, are fielding a starting lineup that includes players who began their careers at Delaware, Dayton, Drexel and San Diego State. And it’s working.
Fifteen of the Underdog 30 were unrated by 247 Sports coming out of high school. No stars. That group includes the following:
The leading scorers for No. 1 seed Florida (Walter Clayton Jr., transfer from Iona) and the No. 2 seed Tennessee Volunteers (Chaz Lanier, transfer from North Florida); Kentucky’s leader in rebounds, assists and blocks (Amari Williams, transfer from Drexel); the leading NCAA tournament scorer for Arkansas (Johnell Davis, transfer from FAU); and Michigan’s tourney leader in minutes played (Danny Wolf, transfer from Yale).
So, what’s happening here? A bunch of things.
- As we’ve seen for several years, the ability to transfer without sitting out a season has transformed player movement and roster fungibility. The portal is jammed with talent, and there is less reluctance from both players and schools to shop around. Players don’t feel tethered to where they are, and coaches don’t feel tethered to who they have.
- The COVID-19 impact is still being felt, on the front end and back end of these players’ careers. Many of the transfers had their recruiting curtailed by the pandemic shutdown of 2020, which limited their exposure and hindered college evaluators. Recruiting has always been an inexact science, but that added a greater degree of guesswork.
- Then-Iona coach Rick Pitino never saw Clayton play in person, only Zoom workouts, before offering him a scholarship. (His reported first appraisal: “Fat, slow and can’t shoot … but he can pass.”) Ohio Bobcats coach Jeff Boals offered current Alabama star guard Mark Sears based on film clips, not in-person evaluation. And many of these players are still in college ball because they got an extra year of eligibility thanks to the pandemic—a key developmental side effect that has skewed rosters older.
- Players who have shown they can produce in college—even at a mid-major or low-major level—are more highly prized than the majority of high school graduates. Coaches are more willing to ride with a known commodity from, say, the Sun Belt Conference than taking a flyer on a freshman. That has sent more talented freshmen to what could realistically be termed the developmental leagues for a couple years of seasoning before the high-majors come calling.
“A lot of high majors will say they’d rather get an all-league mid-major guy than a high school kid,” Boals says. “We get them here and then the development happens in the first two years. The high majors want them from there.”
Adds Spradlin: “The biggest reason you’re seeing it, the guys that go to the mid-major level like Johni, they play. They get on the floor right away. You can’t replace the experience that comes with playing and winning. It’s harder now for freshmen to get on the floor [at the high-major level].”
- Seeing it work has only accelerated the trend. When Broome does what he did, or Dalton Knecht goes from the Northern Colorado Bears to Tennessee and leads the SEC in scoring, that resonates. It makes it easier for both the Volunteers to target another mid-major call-up in Lanier, and for Lanier to believe he can be a high-major star. Sears becoming an instant starter and impact player on Alabama’s No. 1-seeded team in 2023 probably helped it believe that North Dakota State transfer Grant Nelson could do the same thing for a Final Four team in ’24.
The Underdog 30 falls, broadly, into four different categories: Players who high-major schools simply missed on for a variety of reasons; foreign prospects who didn’t have an extensive body of work in the U.S.; football prospects who were late to hoops; and players who were demoted from high-major to mid-major and then went back.
The first category includes unrated, late-developing big men like Wolf, Kentucky’s Andrew Carr (who went from Delaware to Wake Forest to UK) and Nelson, who came out of Devils Lake, N.D., with Division I offers from only in-state schools. There also were well-traveled, unrated prospects who might have gotten lost in the process like Auburn’s Denver Jones (three high schools, a junior college and FIU) and Chad Baker-Mazara (from the Dominican Republic to a New Jersey high school to a postgrad year in Ohio to Duquesne to San Diego State to junior college).
There were others who were rated, but not very high. Ole Miss point guard Jaylen Murray was No. 303 in the Class of 2021, which is how he wound up at Saint Peter’s. Florida’s Will Richard was No. 330 in the same class and landed at Belmont. Lamont Butler, now at Kentucky after a Final Four star turn at San Diego State, was No. 243 in his class. Sion James, a starter at Duke, went to Tulane as the No. 437 prospect.
“We’re getting them at our level for a reason,” Boals says. “They’re skinny, they’re overweight, they’re too short, they’re not physically mature.”
The most perplexing unrated player was Davis, from Gary, Ind. He played at a small high school, 21st Century Charter, but averaged 25 points per game as a junior in an area known for producing talent, and played for the high-profile Indy Heat AAU team. His scholarship offers were from FAU, Kent State and Northern Illinois, and he committed in the summer of 2019 to Dusty May and the Owls. By the time he was averaging 31 points as a senior, it was too late for the high-major programs to swoop in.
There are three members of the Underdog 30 who were considered high-level football prospects—Clayton and Alijah Martin of Florida (via Iona and FAU) and Ja’Kobi Gillespie of the Maryland Terrapins (via Belmont). Basketball recruiters seemed skeptical they would turn down power-conference offers on the gridiron to play basketball, but they all did.
The foreign contingent includes Anthony Dell’Orso (Australia to Campbell to Arizona) and Szymon Zapala (Poland to Utah State to Longwood to Michigan State). And a pair of imports who also fit into the demotion-promotion dynamic.
Vlad Goldin went from Russia to a Connecticut prep school to Texas Tech (where he barely played) to FAU (where started on a Final Four team). Igor Milicic Jr. went from Germany to Virginia (where he barely played) to Charlotte (where he started for two years). Now Goldin is at Michigan and Milicic is at Tennessee.
Ole Miss big man Malik Dia went down to go up as well, from the Vanderbilt Commodores to Belmont to the Rebels. So did Selton Miguel, who went from Kansas State to South Florida to Maryland.
For low-major and mid-major schools that helped send players on their way to becoming high-major stars, there is some pride involved. “Johni held my son up to make baskets,” Spradlin says. “My family cheers for him.” But losing great players after doing the developmental work still stings. Outworking competitors on the front end, only to be outspent on the back end, is the current reality.
And the top-down, predatory poaching is constant. If you think anyone is obeying NCAA tampering rules, you also believe in the Easter Bunny. The portal may have opened this week, but the maneuvering for the next mid-major transfer scores has been going on for a long time.
“There are multiple kids who have known where they’re going next since January,” says one coach. “Their agents have been making calls for weeks, negotiating the price.”
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Underdog 30: The Players Who Went From Overlooked to Sweet 16 Starters.