The Gracie Merkle journey proves NCAA transfer portal is pure anarchy — Kelsey Plum talks Sparks

Basketball Wednesday

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For those of you who may not have been following: Gracie Merkle is a talented 6’6 center who played freshman year for Bellarmine in 2022-23, transferred to Penn State, played her junior year there in 2024-25. She entered the transfer portal on March 25, then announced she was transferring to Maryland on April 5. Maryland trumpeted this in a press release on April 8, announcing that she’d officially signed. She even appeared on Maryland’s social channels!

All of which led to shockwaves around the sport when Merkle announced on Instagram that she was returning to Penn State, after all. My friend and colleague Mitchell Northam has an excellent rundown of what happened.

Like so much else here in 2025, there’s been a series of reckonings along the lines of: “That’s illegal, right? Who’s going to step in and stop it?” I’ve already taken to asking coaches I speak with in recent months if they even remember the last time the NCAA stepped in to sanction a player or team, and the lack of enforcement is now as critical a part of the NCAA’s story as any single aspect of the organization now.

Here’s the thing, though: in conversations I’ve had with a half-dozen coaches, it isn’t clear any rules here were violated at all.

Let me just lay it out from a journalist’s perspective. To my mind, the two areas to investigate, once I heard about Merkle’s decision, were whether she, by reneging on her commitment, had violated the rules for the transfer portal and should have to sit out the year, or whether Penn State, if they contacted her to try and recruit her at any time after Maryland signed her, had committed a violation.

To be clear: I’m more sympathetic to the player than the team in this scenario. Maybe Merkle had second thoughts. Young people are pulled in many different directions in college basketball. I am more generally of the belief that greater freedom for college athletes and seeing college athletes paid for their work are both positive developments of the past few years.

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Still, a rule is a rule, right? Incredibly, no. Signing with Maryland only meant signing what are generally called “financial agreements”, which carry none of the force of rules or law the National Letter of Intent (NLI) we’ve known and loved for the past 60 years held, before the NCAA eliminated them last fall.

In other words: what Gracie Merkle signed was decorative. She never left the transfer portal. Penn State, or anyone else, was free to recruit her. Maryland allowed Allie Kubek, for instance, to head to Florida State because they had Merkle to play more center minutes. The Terrapins did right by their players, past and future. They got burned for it. Is there even room in this system for programs to do that now?

Which brings us to the Penn State part. Now look: even if it is legal to do so, does Penn State want to recruit players who have committed and signed elsewhere? That is an escalation of the arms race of recruiting that it is easy to see backfiring on the program, by the old rules especially, but certainly in ways that could lead to future poaching of the Penn State roster.

And a public disclosure of how Penn State pulled this off would be, at the very least, embarrassing. Fortunately for the Nittany Lions, Penn State is not, get this, a state university subject to Pennsylvania’s Right To Know Law, thanks to a 2007 state Supreme Court decision. Yes, this shaped much of what we learned, when we learned it (or didn’t) a few years later about the football program.

But leave embarrassment out of it. Penn State needs players. Carolyn Kieger’s team finished 1-17 in the Big Ten in 2024-25. She probably doesn’t need to be thinking about recruiting the next time a scenario like this presents itself if she finishes 1-17 in the Big Ten again next year. That’s how Kiyomi McMiller ends up on campus, too, a player who for all her talent was not considered by multiple other Power 5 conference coaches I spoke with.

There will always be programs and coaches who need to think about the immediate in desperate terms. The problem, as I see it, isn’t that part, but rather what this fundamentally means for the system as a whole. Take a look at how many players entered the portal. Now consider what every single program in the country is going to realize: not only are all of these players available, even once they’ve signed with a new team, they are still available.

That’s obviously going to drive a lot of good people out of coaching (and reward the most ruthless in the industry), but it’s also going to mean a complete lack of security for virtually every single player, too. At any moment, your program, where you have a scholarship? They might recruit over you. At any moment, you could be facing questions about not only your educational future, but your financial future, too. Who benefits from a system like this?

There is a reason why, when Marvin Miller learned of the legal decision which freed every single Major League Baseball player to enter free agency, he chose instead to negotiate a set of terms that dictated how many years a player must play before becoming a free agent. His reasoning was a simple as it proved to be accurate: limit the supply, and the bidding for those who enter free agency will go up. (Something for the WNBPA to ponder as it negotiates this new CBA!)

But what it means is that anyone lamenting the professionalization of women’s college basketball is missing the point. There are no pro rules here. There are no real rules at all, and real doubts about the governing body’s desire to enforce what few rules remain. The resulting system is terrible for coaches and programs, for players, for fans.

And it is unclear how even the efforts made by some players to collectively bargain as a unit, or even as a team, could be enforced under current law and the current administration.

I don’t have a solution for you here. I’m just here to tell you: this is not professionalization. This is pure anarchy. And Gracie Merkle is just the beginning of stories like this. As someone who wants to see players succeed and be rewarded, coaches who care about both winning and impacting lives build careers, fans who are connected to this game given a through-line to follow it all: it’s depressing as hell.

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