UConn basketball head coach Dan Hurley has received a lot of attention because of his recent transfer portal comments. The two-time national champion recently appeared on 60 Minutes, and he talked about how big of an impact the transfer portal has in this era of college basketball. Hurley noted that half of his roster is considering the portal, and that claim jumped out to a lot of people. “50 percent of my roster or more is at least considering going in the portal, if not already knows what school that they’re going to,” Dan Hurley said. “Yeah, and in a couple of those cases, they’ve already talked to the coaching staff at the future school and have an idea of what their NIL is going to be there.” Remember, none of that should be happening at this point because these players aren’t actually in the transfer portal yet. Other coaches aren’t allowed to pursue players who aren’t in the portal, as it breaks the tampering rule. Hurley was asked about his transfer portal comments on Wednesday, and he doesn’t seem to think that it’s that big of a deal. “I don’t really get the consternation and the panic and the reaction. I mean, that’s been like that the last couple of years. Schools were recruiting one of our best players off the ’23 championship team during the season with promises that they got NIL. So this is not, yeah, we’ve dealt with this. Obviously, we dealt with it after ’22 with losing some players, and there was a giant panic in Connecticut over what the team would look like, and then, obviously our response was what we’ve done the last two years.” Hurley has been coaching for a long time now, and he understands that the transfer portal is just part of life in college basketball. If you can’t adapt to this new era of the game, you won’t be successful. “It’s just a reality of college now,” he continued. “It’s total free agency. Players and their families, and their agents, and the people around them get to make a decision after every season based on what’s in the best interest of their career, just like coaches get to. I don’t see that there’s anything wrong with that. We would like all of our players to return. We don’t want, really, any players to ever leave us. We’d love everyone to stay, finish their career, earn the role that they want.” A lot of players transfer when things aren’t working out with a certain team, but Hurley thinks that transferring doesn’t solve the issue more often than not. A lot of times, it’s the player and not the program. “Your problems follow you as a player. If you’re not getting what you want as a player, it’s a change of scenery. Doesn’t do it. Usually it’s something you’re not doing as a player that puts you in a position where you’re not as productive as you want, or not getting as many minutes as you want. I guess there’s two things you can do there. You could stay where you are and improve those areas so you can get what you want, or you could look for that with a with a change of venue. But a lot of times your problems follow you in life. It’s a lot of times there’s things that you’re not doing to put yourself in a better position to have opportunity.” Dan Hurley is aware that he is going to have to deal with transfer portal departures every season. It’s part of the game, and while it’s unfortunate, he is used to it.