Texas roster upheaval
Texas women’s basketball faces a major roster overhaul after its Final Four run — four players entered the transfer portal just days after the Longhorns reached the national semifinals for the second straight year. (usatoday.com) That churn comes amid a broader portal surge — more than 1,000 names are listed now — and The Athletic highlights Iowa State’s Audi Crooks as the portal’s top impact player to watch. (nytimes.com)
Texas just made the Final Four for the second straight season, then lost four players to the transfer portal within days of the April 4 semifinal loss to University of California, Los Angeles. Jordan Lee, Justice Carlton, Aaliyah Crump, and DeYona Gaston are all leaving a team that finished 35-4. (usatoday.com) (texaslonghorns.com) This is not the usual “bench players looking for minutes” story. Lee averaged 13.2 points per game, Carlton averaged 8.5, Crump averaged 7.9, and Gaston arrived at Texas last offseason after averaging 21.2 points at Auburn. (usatoday.com) Lee was the jolt because she was Texas’s third-leading scorer and one of the pieces that made the offense fit together. In the Final Four loss, she scored 7 points, and earlier in the season USA Today had already labeled her Texas’s “secret weapon” next to Madison Booker and Rori Harmon. (usatoday.com 1) (usatoday.com 2) (texaslonghorns.com) Carlton hurts for a different reason. She started in the national semifinal, scored 7 straight third-quarter points against UCLA to cut the lead to 1, and was a former top-10 recruit from Katy, Texas, which made her look like part of the next core, not a short-term stop. (texaslonghorns.com) (longhornswire.usatoday.com) The timing makes the roster math harsher. Texas was already losing graduate guard Rori Harmon and senior center Kyla Oldacre, and Harmon left as the program’s all-time leader in assists with 977 and steals with 388. (texaslonghorns.com) (longhornswire.usatoday.com) That means Vic Schaefer is not replacing one star guard or one post player. He is trying to rebuild a rotation that just lost two exhausted-eligibility veterans, a breakout scorer in Lee, a Final Four starter in Carlton, a five-star freshman in Crump, and a proven transfer scorer in Gaston. (texaslonghorns.com) (usatoday.com) (longhornswire.usatoday.com) The reason this can happen so fast is the calendar. The women’s basketball transfer portal opened on April 6 and runs for 15 days through April 20, so teams can go from playing in Phoenix one week to reassembling half a roster the next. (justwomenssports.com) Texas is dealing with the same wave hitting the whole sport, just at a sharper angle. The Athletic reported that more than 1,000 Division One players entered within the first day, and ESPN reported on April 8 that the number had already climbed past 1,300. (nytimes.com) (espn.com) That is why one name like Audi Crooks matters to every contender, including programs staring at sudden holes. Crooks averaged 25.8 points for Iowa State, ranked second nationally in scoring, and The Athletic put her at the top of its impact-player watch list. (nytimes.com) (espn.com) (usatoday.com) Texas still has Madison Booker, who finished her junior season with 1,969 career points and scored 738 this year, plus young guards like Bryanna Preston on the roster. But the version of Texas that reached back-to-back Final Fours is gone, and the next version will be built in the same portal that just tore this one apart. (texaslonghorns.com 1) (texaslonghorns.com 2)
