How the Transfer Portal Changed Face of Women’s March Madness

One year ago, Oregon State was one of the most dangerous teams outside of the top eight women’s seeds, and made good on the hype with an Elite Eight run that included an upset over Notre Dame before a loss to eventual national champion South Carolina.

This year, Oregon State returned to the tournament as a No. 14 seed and was beaten handily by No. 3 North Carolina in the round of 64, losing 70-49. Yet when coach Scott Rueck said postgame that “For this team, for it to end here today, nobody would have predicted it,” he was not referring to a disappointing 2024-25 season, but rather the opposite.

The reason was apparent. The 2023-24 Beavers team that made the Elite Eight went on to lose its top six scorers to the transfer portal—and of those six, four play key roles on teams that are headed to the Sweet 16 in 2025.

Raegan Beers, who led the Beavers last season with 17.5 points per game, is averaging that same amount for Oklahoma this year, helping lead the Sooners to the championship game of their first SEC tournament. Beers’ 11 points and 13 rebounds in Oklahoma’s NCAA Tournament second-round game Monday helped send the Sooners to the Sweet 16 with a 96-62 win over Iowa. The defending national runner-up Hawkeyes bowed out despite a game-high 20 points from guard Lucy Olsen, who transferred in from Villanova to help fill the large gap left by NCAA all-time leading scorer Caitlin Clark.

Meanwhile, the Beavers’ former conference rivals USC and UCLA also pillaged Oregon State’s roster to help fortify their own behind superstars JuJu Watkins and Lauren Betts, respectively. Forward Talia von Oelhoffen, whose active social media presence helped increase Oregon State’s profile during the Beavers’ run last postseason, transferred to USC last offseason and has been heavily involved with the Trojans’ team-wide NIL deal with Chipotle. Timea Gardner, Oregon State’s second-highest scorer last season with 11.6 points per game, now comes off the bench for UCLA and recently partook in the Bruins’ team-wide NIL partnership with Epic Games for its Fortnite video game. The Bruins are the top overall seed in the 2025 women’s NCAA Tournament and won their first two games by a combined 65 points for a Sweet 16 berth.

Former Beavers guard Donovyn Hunter, the team’s fourth-highest scorer last year, just helped TCU reach its first-ever women’s Sweet 16 with 18 points in the No. 2 Horned Frogs’ second-round win over No. 7 Louisville. The main storyline of that game, though, was star TCU guard Hailey Van Lith, facing off against the Louisville team she started her career with before a one-year stint at LSU last season — all thanks to the transfer portal.

Gap Grows

The talent drain that hit Oregon State women’s basketball—one of many of the school’s sports weakened by the school’s drop to mid-major status after the implosion of the Pac-12—is the starkest example of how the transfer portal and name-image-likeness (NIL) rules have widened the gap between haves and have-nots in women’s college basketball. But it’s not the only one.

TCU just has to look across the court at its Sweet 16 matchup on Saturday for an example. Notre Dame is back in the tournament’s second weekend for the fourth straight year thanks to two key transfers from Pitt and Marquette, neither of which has much of a women’s basketball pedigree. 

But until last offseason, the Panthers did have Liatu King, who was the ACC’s Most Improved Player and First Team All-ACC last year after averaging 18.7 points and 10.3 rebounds per game. She’s now a key part of the Fighting Irish starting five behind star Hannah Hidalgo, averaging 11.4 points and 10.4 rebounds per game.

Karlen has taken a more diminished role—she went from making First Team All-Big East and helping Marquette to the NCAA Tournament last offseason to coming off the bench for the Fighting Irish. The Golden Eagles failed to return to the tournament this year.

But both King and Karlen can be seen alongside their Fighting Irish teammates in one of Allstate’s newest ad campaigns—an opportunity that likely wouldn’t be afforded them at their prior schools.

USC, UCLA Load Up

The two Los Angeles schools have been able to successfully leverage their location in the nation’s second-largest media market—and the exposure added by stars like Watkins and Betts—to build title-contending rosters around those stars. Gardner and von Oelhoffen, the former Oregon State stars, are not the only high-profile transfers on UCLA and USC, respectively. 

Betts herself is a transfer who started her collegiate career at Stanford before moving to the Bruins in 2023, and she now averages nearly 20 points and 10 rebounds for the top-ranked team in the nation. Her former Stanford teammate Kiki Irafen transferred to USC last offseason and is now the Trojans’ second-leading scorer behind Watkins with 18.0 points per game. Stanford is still a power-conference team now in the ACC, but the Cardinal just missed the women’s NCAA Tournament for the first time in 36 years.

Meanwhile, two Los Angeles crosstown rivals’ Selection Sunday experience mirrored each other closely. Not only did they both earn No. 1 seeds in this year’s tournament, but their respective NIL collectives both hosted meet-and-greets with their athletes after the festivities.