But where you might expect that to make up the bulk of the adds for a team like WSU — I mean, this was true as recently as two years ago — that’s not really the case anymore. The NIL environment has shifted in a few significant ways for WSU.

First and foremost, there is just a lot more money out there for rosters construction at the Power 4 + Big East level. The value of NIL contracts has expanded exponentially since their (legal) inception a few years ago, which isn’t really doing much for the NCAA’s decades old argument that there wasn’t really a market out there like this for players and that fans would cease to care about college sports if they became professionalized. There are rumors of a team out there with a $30 million roster, and coaches seem relatively sure that there are at least a couple dozen above $20 million.

That means there is a lot more cash to be splashed around. And since coaches hate nothing more than speculating, they’re spending that money on “proven” commodities — or, at least, guys who are as “proven” as they can be at a lower level. That’s how guys like ND Okafor and Eemeli Yalaho get paydays that, if WSU paid it, would eat up all of the Cougs’ budget — just for those two players! Both are highly unlikely to be stars, but after playing big minutes at WSU last year and being reasonably productive as taller guys, coaches will spend to add them to their rosters because they have height and because they feel like they know what they are getting.

That now goes for players transferring out of programs below WSU’s level, too. The kinds of guys from low majors who might have been available to the Cougars in the past as up-transferring difference makers are just generally bypassing the middle of Division 1 altogether.

WSU is not only operating with a fraction of other teams’ total NIL budget, Riley’s fraction isn’t even expanding at the same rate. Which is why the Cougars have added just a couple of “proven” guys — but even that might be a little bit of a stretch with a dose of cope: Lazerek Houston is coming from Division 2, while Sebastian Akins is coming back down to us from the ACC after starting at Denver and being pretty good there, but not really a full-on star.

Which means that Riley can’t be as focused on raising the floor as coaches at high majors, something he seems to have acknowledged after last season’s mess. Riley seems to have made his peace with the fact that he’s got to be a little — check that, A LOT — more comfortable with unknowns in order to raise the ceiling.

Which brings us to the next batch of players.

Inevitably, there are guys available who were highly thought of as high school recruits who didn’t pan out at their first (or even second) stops, for whatever reason. Presumably, the talent that made them highly regarded in the first place is still in there, and Riley is giving them what should be a mutually beneficial opportunity: Come to WSU, play big minutes, help us win, rehab your career, and jump back up to the level you came from for a payday.

That sort of strategy might seem distasteful to fans who long for the days of “lifelong Cougs” and roster stability, but until meaningful reform comes to the NCAA (either through federal legislation or collective bargaining), this is the reality we live in. Riley even acknowledges as much, explicitly stating the new recruiting pitch during his media availability last week.

“As much as it hurts to see (our players) leave … there's like $10 million almost walking out the door with the contracts they signed. And so we we basically 10x-ed their value, and it's exciting for those guys,” he said. “Obviously we would love to keep them and have a little more retention than we did this year. But at the same time, we’ve done that two years in a row now where we've created a lot of value for for players.

“And I think there's a very clear path, seeing, yeah, you can probably 5 or 6x your your NIL value in one year, you can 10x it in two years, you can 50x it in three years. When you look at, you know, guys like like LeJuan (Watts) and and and Cedric (Coward) who who actually stayed for three years and, you know, ND (Okafor), and Ri (Vavers) and these guys staying for two years, like there's just a lot of examples of guys getting better in this program, developing.”

It sucks, and it undoubtedly makes it less fun to follow a program from a fan perspective. But personally, I’d rather be uncomfortable and win games than lament a bygone era and lose.

These guys give you an opportunity to do that if Riley can unlock their talent.

Redshirt freshman | 6-5/210 | Providence

If we apply the metric “how bummed out is the fanbase of the previous school to lose him,” then Harrell might shoot to the top of the list of transfers we landed. He’s a former top 100 high school recruit who chose Providence over Rutgers and Xavier while also holding offers from Kansas, Alabama, and others (including Washington). But he suffered a knee injury early last season before ever really getting a chance to show what he could do for the Friars, which eventually required surgery.

Harrell oozes talent and is a great bet to be taking. Here’s how he was scouted at 247 Sports when he was a high school player:

Jaylen Harrell is a long and broadly built scoring wing who plays primarily off his jumper, but is a threat in various ranges. He has solid positional size and a better-than-plus-four inch wingspan. While he's not a naturally quick or explosive athlete, he's strong, able to get to his spots, and score over top of contesting defenders with a high release.

While Harrell has converted 32.6% of his threes in the EYBL regular season, he's a better shooter than that number indicates. Ironically, while he's known as more of a shooter, it's inside the arc where he's most effective, shooting 58% on two-point field goals thanks to the prowess of his pull-up game and willingness to bring smaller, or less physical, defenders into the mid-post area. He can have a high-volume attack at times, but has shown real progression as a passer recently, some signs of being a good off-ball cutter, and also has good hands and natural touch.

The biggest area of emphasis will be on the defensive end of the floor, where his lack of footspeed can limit him at times, but he has the length and upper body strength to compensate if he can continue to make gains with his overall conditioning.

Ooooooh … a big, physical guard who can get his own shot, mostly based on strength? Yes, please! We had one of those once. His name was Coward, and now he’s in the NBA at basically the same size as Harrell. They’re somewhat different players, but don’t think for a second that Riley wasn’t banging that drum early and and often during Harrell’s recruitment.

And great news for Harrell: He won’t really be asked to defend in any meaningful way while playing for Riley, so whatever “lack of footspeed” he has (either naturally or as a result of a knee injury) won’t probably be as much of an issue playing for us as it would be elsewhere.

Redshirt junior | 6-2/190 | TCU

Another former top 100 high school recruit! But unlike Harrell, he’s had an opportunity to show what he can do, and it just hasn’t quite clicked. Jones originally landed at Kansas State in 2023-24, where he averaged fewer than 10 minutes across 28 games in a bit role off the bench. He transferred to TCU, but that was a disaster: He suffered a foot injury that caused him to miss all of 2024-25, then last year, he ended up buried on the bench, playing in just nine games and exceeding seven minutes only twice.

Now, that was a pretty good TCU team that earned a nine seed and won a tournament game, and Jamie Dixon rolled with a short rotation pretty much all year¹. But the fact that he couldn’t find any minutes does make me wonder just how good he really is — there are always top 100 guys who flame out. But there are two things I’ll hold onto here, since this is the season for optimism.

First, Dixon recruited over the top of Jones while he was injured, bringing in three guys who ended up playing virtually all the minutes at the guard spots. And only two of those guys had similar profiles to Jones. It’s certainly plausible that Jones didn’t just fit anymore after Dixon reshaped his rotation to include just a pair of 6-footers with everyone else at 6-5 or taller. Second, it’s worth wondering if Jones’ foot injury lingered a bit. I can’t find any reporting on it, but — TCU blew out some bad teams in the nonconference, yet Jones didn’t get any meaningful run in games until the end of December, when he played 16 and 17 minutes in back-to-back contests. He only played three more times the rest of the year.

In his media availability last week, Riley made no mention of any lingering injury issues for Jones. If Jones is healthy, maybe a step down in competition with a full offseason of preparation is exactly what he needs to unlock the talent everyone thought was in there when he was choosing between offers from KSU, Texas A&M, and Boise State, with offers from Illinois, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, and USC also in hand.

And, apropos of nothing, Jones also wins Best Smile in the recruiting class.

Redshirt junior | 6-8/255 | UNLV

Oh look! It’s another guy coming off an injury! Sensing a theme?

Dembele actually has the fewest question marks of anyone in this category in terms of what he can do on the floor, given that he was a productive reserve at Iowa for a couple of seasons before heading off to UNLV for a bigger role after Iowa’s coaching change. But that effort never got off the ground because of a foot injury that required season-ending surgery just seven games into the season.

Dembele is comfortable around the basket, but he can hit a 3, and in that way, he’s a bit of a quintessential Riley big man who can move in and out within the offense, something that we didn’t really see last season from a cast of bigs who either wanted to be in the paint or beyond the arc, but not both. In his sophomore year at Iowa, he was pretty dang good, scoring with efficiency thanks to hitting 38% of his 34 threes. You’d love better finishing inside the paint from a big (he was just 50% from two as a sophomore), but he also gives you excellent offensive rebounding (he would have finished second in the Big Ten in offensive rebounding percentage if he’d have played enough minutes to qualify).

And I’ll just say this: If Fran McCaffrey — the former coach at Iowa noted for his high-octane offenses — thought Dembele could play, then there’s a really good chance he’ll be an excellent fit for Riley and a pretty big upgrade for us at center … again, provided he is healthy.

Junior | 6-4/195 | Oregon

Phillips carries the highest high school recruiting rating of any of these players, having been in the top 50. He’s also played the most with the least to show for it after two years in Eugene. He barely saw the floor as a freshman, but he saw it a fair amount this year, playing about 30% of the team’s minutes once the Ducks hit conference play. And there’s really no other way to put it, other than he was quite bad: He was a less efficient player than Adria Rodriguez, to give you some context.

However, there’s reason to think he can be more, based solely on this: Over those two years, nearly 80% of his shots came from beyond the arc. That is a ridiculous proportion more befitting an NBA 3-and-D guy, not a former top 50 recruit, who surely earned that evaluation by doing a lot more than just shooting threes. Complicating matters is that he wasn’t particularly good at making those threes, hitting only 29%.

The two big questions here are whether he can do more than just camp out at the line and whether he’s truly a 29% shooter from deep. Riley seems convinced that he can do more from different parts of the floor and that he’s a much better shooter than he’s shown.

“I think he needs a setting where he's got a a coach that can let him operate in a little more freedom and I think he can have a ton of success here,” Riley said. “And he can really really really shoot it. He's a guy that that I think is going to thrive and be be the next of those wings that has that has done really really good in our in our system.”

We’ll have Part Three: Miscast Misfits in the coming days. Stay tuned!

We talked quite a bit about Harrell, Dembele, and Phillips! Basketball talk starts at 15:51 if you want to skip past the football talk:

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