LOGAN — Last week, on April 10, new Utah State head coach Sprinkle stood at a podium in the Wayne Estes Center and used his words to try and win over Utah State fans on what was day one of his new job. Hearing those words, spoken in front of a few hundred Utah State fans, one might have thought Sprinkle was a life-long Aggie. He kept listing off former Aggie greats, both coaches and players. He even listed off some lesser-known names. He tied his own history with the history of Utah State. Sprinkle isn’t a native of Cache Valley (some open-eared fans caught him pronouncing it “Cash-ay Valley” which further cemented the point) but with passion and knowledge backing up what might have otherwise been lip service, it doesn’t really matter. Sprinkle already feels like part of the community.
But now Sprinkle has to back up those words with his actions, because once November comes all the words in the world won’t do much if the numbers win/loss column don’t align with Aggie fan’s expectations.
In an interview on the Light the A podcast, Sprinkle talked about the challenges of constructing a roster that has been decimated by offseason attrition. As of right now, four players from last year’s team — Max Shulga, Sean Bairstow, Steven Ashworth and Szymon Zapala — have entered the transfer portal. Sprinkle was blunt in saying he doesn’t expect any to don the fighting white again.
“To be honest, all of the players in the portal, they will not be coming back,” Sprinkle said on the podcast. “It was done before I got here, way before I got here. It’s unfortunate, but we wish those guys the best and obviously were tremendous Aggies and they’ll always love Utah State but they obviously wanted to move in a different direction.”
Those four players combined with the departures Dan Akin, RJ Eytle-Rock, Taylor Funk and Trevin Dorius, whose collegiate basketball careers are over, mean that at least eight roster spots (there could still be more) have been opened on the 2023-24 roster. That simple number may seem fairly high, but it only kind of is. It’s been commonplace for a while now for the Aggies to lose between five and seven players each season through transfers or graduation. In fact the average over the previous 10 seasons, not including this year, is 5.6. In the last decade three other USU teams have had at least seven players leave (the 2014-15 team had to replace nine players from the previous team). But where this year differs is in the magnitude of those departures.
For previous teams, a good chunk of the players that left were guys on the back end of the rotation plus one or two of the top three players. Take the most recent Aggie team for example, the 2022-23 roster. They lost five players from the ’21-22 season, and while two of them were Justin Bean and Brandon Horvath — the top two leading scorers — the three other departures were guys further down in production. Five of the seven players in the rotation returned to play this past season. But for this season, eight of the top nine minute-getters for Utah State are on their way out the door, including each of the team’s top six scorers. It’s a disastrous combination of losses and not an easy one to overcome.
“We’ve got to fill pretty much an entire roster. Which I don’t know if any other school in the country’s had to do that,” Sprinkle said. “We’re going to have probably eight scholarships that we need to fill and it is mid-April, which is scary but we’ve got to find a way to get it done.”
Going back to that 2014-15 team it’s actually the one season that does seem to parallel this year the most. There wasn’t a coaching change, Stew Morrill was staying on for what would be one final year, but he lost eight of his top nine rotation players and his top five scorers — a near exact match to this season. Oddly enough, the ’14-15 team ended up with a slightly better record (18-13) than the ’13-14 team (18-14) and actually flipped a 7-11 record in Mountain West play to 11-7.
So how did that ’14-15 team pull off being a winning team despite some of the worst single-season attrition the team had ever faced? Ultimately, it came down to low or non-contributing players stepping up and bringing a couple of the right transfers.
Firstly, Jalen Moore — a freshman on the ’13-14 team — jumped into a full-time starting role as a sophomore. He doubled his minutes per game and tripled his points per game, leading the team at 15.2 per game. David Collette, a redshirt on the ’13-14 team, also jumped head-first into a major role, starting alongside Moore in the frontcourt as just a freshman. In the backcourt the Aggies brought in two JUCO transfers, Chris Smith and Darius Perkins, who became full-time starters. Freshman Julion Pearre and sophomore JoJo McGlaston also featured heavily in the rotation, starting 31 games between themselves (24 for Pearre, seven for McGlaston).
So to add it all together, four of Utah State’s top six contributors on the 2014-15 team were underclassmen (freshmen Collette and Pearre, and sophomores Moore and McGlaston) with the other two in that group being JUCO transfers. That kind of group isn’t typically expected to rattle off 18 wins and finish fourth in a conference like the Mountain West, but turns out those guys were talented. Looking back at this group it raises a pretty big question: Can the 2023-24 Aggies repeat this kind of reload?
Finding similarities is surprisingly easy, some being a bit too similar. For instance, Moore was a former Sky View High School star who became an Aggie star in his second year with the team while Mason Falslev, the current Aggie guard, was also a star at Sky View and enters his second season after redshirting last year. Other youngsters currently on the team such as Zee Hamoda and Isaac Johnson may also look to emulate the likes of Moore and Collette in taking big jumps.
Even if we see some jumps from the youngsters already on the team, there’s still going to be a need to find players through the transfer portal that can contribute. Utah State has been pretty successful in recent years at finding impact players. Taylor Funk and Dan Akin last year, Brandon Horvath the year before, and even before that there was Marco Anthony and Alphonso Anderson. Landing one or two good transfers hasn’t been too difficult for any of Utah State’s recent coaches. Sprinkle shouldn’t be much of an exception, though he’s also started a bit late which adds a challenge to his task.
“That’s the hard thing. With such a late date getting started and getting into the portal where a lot of kids, they’ve been on visits the past month and they’re committing to schools,” Sprinkle said. “There was a dead period this week so I got the job and it’s a dead period and today’s the first day it’s opened up so we’ll have some kids on campus this weekend.”
The first place to look for potential transfers could be at Sprinkle’s old stomping grounds, Montana State. Three of his former players — guards Darius Brown II and RaeQuan Battle along with forward Great Osobor — entered the transfer portal the same day a recruiting dead period ended and teams could host players for visits. Brown was Third Team All-Big Sky and the conference’s Defensive Player of the Year. Battle led the Bobcats in scoring at 17.7 points per game and earned First Team All-Big Sky honors and was named Big Sky Tournament MVP. Osobor was the Big Sky Sixth Man of the Year. It stands to reason all three could contribute at Utah State if there’s mutual interest.
Aside from Montana State players, it’s possible players originally recruited by Sprinkle to play for the Bobcats may see an invitation to Utah State instead. Sprinkle himself said it would be the case.
“There’s kids that we were recruiting to Montana State that we had great relationships and we’re going to continue to recruit them here because they’re talented enough to play in this league. That’s not the case for every kid we were recruiting. There were some players that would have been just great at the Big Sky level but they’re not ready for the Mountain West level.”
Two more possibilities in terms of Sprinkle his own Montana State class to Utah State are Jackson Grant and Kiree Huie. Grant, a 6-foot-10 center who spent two years at Washington, entered the transfer portal and initially committed to the Bobcats right before Sprinkle left MSU. Soon after Sprinkle arrived in Logan, Grant re-opened his recruitment. Huie, a 6-foot-9 forward/center from Odessa College, is the 23rd-ranked junior college player according to JucoRecruiting.com. He likewise had committed to play for the Bobcats but reopened his recruitment in the wake of Sprinkle’s departure from Bozeman.
Another player to keep an eye on is UC Irvine guard Dawson Baker. The 6-foot-3 guard has reportedly narrowed the list of team’s he’d like to join to Utah State, Boise State, BYU and Utah. Baker averaged 15.3 points last year and earned Second Team All-Big West honors.
Aside from transfers, which appear likely to make up the bulk of Sprinkle’s recruiting, or at least those that are likely to make big contributions, but adding players the old fashioned way — high school recruits — is still technically possible. Although Sprinkle himself noted that method isn’t as viable as it once was.
“I would love to get some young kids that have four years that you can develop. But this day and age it’s not what it used. to be,” Sprinkles said. “I don’t know what the percentage of kids staying at the same school for four years is now but I would bet you it’s under 25 percent.”
Utah State does retain four commitments, for now, on high school recruits who committed during former head coach Ryan Odom’s — Kalifa Sakho, Garrison Phelps, Karson Templin and Dallin Grant. Whether all choose to stay with their commitment to USU or head elsewhere now that the coaches that recruited them have left remains to be seen. But these incoming players could balance out the likely eight-man newcomer list Sprinkle will bring to Logan.
Time will only tell how Sprinkle will choose to fill the giant hole in Utah State’s rotation, created by a chaotic offseason. It will also be the only tell as to whether he is successful in year one as Ryan Odom and Craig Smith generally were. As understanding as it would be for Sprinkle to falter year one and have a losing season, college basketball can be unforgiving and cruel with impatient fans not always tolerant of poor performance. Sprinkle can enjoy the honeymoon period for now with fans likely to drink up the hype every new player will bring to the table this spring and summer. But come this fall if there’s too high of a number in the loss column, that excitement will quickly wear out the welcome.