Mid-Major Roster Construction Strategies

How teams with limited resources can find success in the modern portal era

In a recent article titled “How to Build A CBB Roster in 2025”, I conducted a study to find the best roster construction strategies for high-majors in the modern portal and NIL era. The data-driven conclusions largely highlight the importance of returning key players each year and prioritizing players who will stay with a program for multiple years.

Power-conference programs often have the resources to build a CBB roster in any manner they choose, but the same can’t be said for the rest of Division 1. It’s harder than ever for mid-major programs to have control over their rosters. The best players from these schools often get poached through the transfer portal, but even rotation players think the grass could be greener elsewhere. How can these programs still find regular success?

Today’s study focuses on how to build a tournament-caliber team for programs outside the high-major level. This includes all teams outside the ACC, Big 10, Big 12, Big East, and SEC, along with Gonzaga and Memphis. I decided to include programs from conferences that can often earn at-large tournament bids, such as the Atlantic-10, Mountain West, American, and WCC. However, some distinctions will be made for these conferences when appropriate.

In this article, we will answer many of these roster-building questions that are pertinent to mid-majors:

How important is roster continuity?

How much does experience matter?

Where can you find stars at the mid-major level?

How can you convince key players to stay for multiple seasons?

Where can you find the best transfers?

Mid-Major Roster Construction Best Practices

We will start with the main conclusions of this 4-year study and then explain each one more in-depth, along with the accompanying research:

1. Retain key talent as much as possible

2. Look for down-transfers from higher levels

3. Limit reliance on freshmen

Studying Recent Trends

Let’s dig deeper into the roster construction of mid-major teams over the last four years. I chose to limit the study to the 2021-22, 2022-23, 2023-24, and 2024-25 seasons because they most closely represent the current landscape of college basketball, with plenty of immediately eligible transfers and NIL playing a massive factor in recruitment. In some cases, I limited this to just the last two seasons when appropriate.

The main variables that I took into consideration for this study were:

1. Preseason roster score ranking¹

2. The percentage of minutes played during the season by returning players

3. The percentage of minutes played by new transfers

4. The percentage of minutes played by freshmen

5. The average years of Division 1 experience on the roster coming into the year

There are different ways of defining what “success” looks like for mid-majors, but I decided to go with what most people care about: making the NCAA tournament. When you compare the roster construction of mid-majors that made the tournament to those that missed the tournament over the last several years, there are some notable differences:

Teams that played in March Madness were much more reliant on returning players, especially at the expense of freshmen. Over 64% of the minutes on tourney-teams went to players on the roster the previous season, almost 10% higher than teams that missed the dance (55%). Meanwhile, just 11% of the minutes for tourney-teams were allocated to incoming freshmen, a much lower mark than for all other teams.

The level of experience on the roster was also higher for teams that played in March Madness, at 1.99 average years of D1 experience, compared to 1.66 for all other teams. Notably, there wasn’t a significant difference in the importance of transfers to these two groups of teams.

If you just isolate this data to mid-majors from 2024-25, teams overall weren’t able to return as many players as in previous years, but those that made the tournament still relied significantly more on returning players than those that missed the dance:

To look at specific success cases, the table below shows the roster composition data for every mid-major team that has won at least one game in the tournament since 2022. Of the 25 teams, 18 gave at least 50% of their minutes to returning players. Perhaps more importantly, 20 out of the 25 teams played freshmen for under 10% of their minutes:

Mid-majors that rely more on incoming transfers can find tournament success. All of these teams that won a game in the tournament and had transfers play over 40% of their minutes: Drake and McNeese in 2025, Utah State, Dayton, Washington State, James Madison, and Grand Canyon in 2024, and Fairleigh Dickinson, Murray State, and New Mexico State in 2022.

However, most of these teams were loaded with experience on the roster. When taking a weighted average of the years of experience on the roster based on playing time, 84% of the teams that have won a game in the tournament averaged over 1.8 years of Division 1 experience coming into the year.

Where Do Mid-Major Stars Come From?

Winning in March often requires having a star player or two, but finding and retaining star talent at the mid-major level is hard. To find out where the best mid-major players get recruited from, I looked at the top 3 players on every mid-major team according to Bayesian Performance Rating at EvanMiya.com and split them into four recruitment categories:

• Incoming transfer

• Incoming freshman

• Returning player, originally recruited by that team out of high school

• Returning player, originally recruited through the transfer portal

The table below shows where the “star” mid-major players are recruited from, comparing teams that made the tournament to teams that missed it:

The big takeaway is that 50% of the star players who made March Madness were recruited by that mid-major school out of high school who stayed for multiple years. So many of the best mid-major players were developed the old-fashioned way: staying with the same team and improving year after year.

Even this last year, many of the best mid-major players in college basketball were guys who originally signed out of high school. The table below shows the top 25 mid-major players in 2024-25 according to Bayesian Performance Rating and their recruitment type. Out of the top 25 players, 11 of them were originally high school recruits:

For every player who chooses to return to his school and be a leading star, more players jump ship through the portal. Every mid-major coach wants to retain the team’s core players each season, but they often struggle to do so since they usually can’t pay as much in NIL as a bigger program might be willing to do.

In my opinion, the pitch to keep core players around another year is to convince them not to transfer to a higher level till they are a bona fide star and can truly capitalize on their market value.

If you look at the best mid-major player on every team this year, a lot of them were returners from the year before, but were not the best player on the team in the previous year. In fact, if you take the top 25 mid-major players who led their team in BPR in 2025 as returning players², there was a significant improvement from the 2024 season to this season. On average, these players were around the 2nd or 3rd best performer on their roster in 2024, ranked around the 396th best player in the country that year. They all became the best player on the team in 2025, improving to the 124th best player in the country on average.

It might be difficult in a lot of cases for a mid-major to stop their best player from transferring. But if a program can retain the guys next in line as the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th best player on the team, they often improve tremendously and can be a catalyst for huge team success before taking advantage of their higher profile and transferring.

Finding The Best Transfers

While retaining as much talent as possible should be the first priority for mid-majors, identifying great fits through the transfer portal is also crucial. Coaches constantly seek the right avenues to find players through the portal, hoping to find a solid contributor or a hidden gem with untapped potential.

The table below shows the top 25 mid-major players from the last two years, according to BPR, who came to that school originally as a transfer (D1 only). I have included each player’s previous team, along with that team’s conference level, split into “High Major”, “Mid Major+” (A-10, American, Mountain West, WCC, Missouri Valley), and “Mid Major”:

A majority of the best D1 transfers to the mid-major level have come from high-major schools (13 out of the 25), and just 2 of the transfers came from a true mid-major or non-D1 school. This shows that the most reliable transfers are players who are down-transferring or staying at the same level of competition. While there are some successful examples of players from low-majors (and outside Division 1) moving up to a higher level, it’s rare for these players to make as big of an impact as transfers from better levels.³

Additionally, many of the best high-major to mid-major transfers fit a particular mold: They were 3 or 4-star recruits out of high school who didn’t find consistent playing time. Of the 13 successful high-major transfers in the previous table, only 2 were 3-stars or better coming out of high school.

Many of the best mid-major incoming transfers have been high-major rejects who couldn’t crack 20 minutes a game at their first school. I pulled a list of some of the most successful players at the mid-major level who were originally at high-major schools but weren’t able to find regular playing time:

There are some big names on the list, including Vlad Goldin (originally at Texas Tech before going to FAU), Jaedon LeDee (TCU to SDSU), Jaelen House (Arizona State to New Mexico), and Drew Pember, who averaged under 3 minutes a game at Tennessee before becoming the two-time Big South player of the year.

The Freshman Payoff

As mentioned previously, teams that make the tournament as mid-majors aren’t usually that reliant on freshmen talent. In the last 4 seasons, if you take the top 5 players from every mid-major team that won a tournament game, just 6% of those players were freshmen.

However, recruiting quality freshmen out of high school is still very important, especially if those players can be retained for multiple years. Many of the best mid-major stars came in as freshmen and improved over multiple years at the same school. While you probably can’t expect them to be major contributors in their first year, the hope is that they will be among your best players in future years.

More Tools

When evaluating players each offseason and deciding what players to keep and what players to pursue in the portal, there are many tools at EvanMiya.com dedicated to comprehensive player assessments and projections. Over 100 Division 1 programs have subscriptions and actively use the site for player evaluations, lineup analysis, game-scouting, and more.

Along with transfer portal ratings for all D1 players based on their predicted value next year, every player has individual player skill projections and grades for all key areas.

You can learn more about these player projections here, along with the lineup optimizer tool here. I also recently released the Front Office Suite tool, designed to help teams and GMs build rosters and get an NIL value for every player, adjusting to the current market.

1. More details on the roster score can be found here.

2. Here is the complete list of returning players who were the best player on their team in 2025: Max Shulga (VCU), Nique Clifford (CSU), Donovan Dent (New Mexico), Mitchell Saxen (Saint Mary’s), Tayton Conerway (Troy), Yaxel Lendeborg (UAB), Aniwaniwa Tait-Jones (UCSD), Bent Leuchten (UC Irvine), Tytan Anderson (Northern Iowa), Tyson Degenhart (Boise State), Mason Falslev (Utah State), Trey Autry (George Washington), Rasheer Fleming (Saint Joe’s), Rylan Jones (Samford), Juslin Bodo Bodo (High Point), Izaiyah Nelson (Arkansas State), Christoph Tilly (Santa Clara), Bez Mbeng (Yale), AK Okereke (Cornell), Alvaro Folgueiras (Robert Morris), Javohn Garcia (McNeese), Chase Walker (Illinois State), Miles Byrd (SDSU), Moulaye Sissoko (North Texas), and Nick Davidson (Nevada).

3. A recent report from AD Advisors details how most players in the transfer portal often transfer down to a lower school.