Pat Summitt and Muffet McGraw had a pretty dynamic professional relationship. Summitt's Lady Vols relentlessly beat McGraw's Fighting Irish for 20 games before Notre Dame knocked Tennessee out of the Elite Eight in 2011; Summitt retired the following year after announcing her diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer's, so the teams never had another rematch.
Summitt, who always pushed for the women's game to be the best it possibly could for everyone (really, everyone) involved, would have her reservations about the current transfer portal system, McGraw said in an interview this week. While she would be thrilled players are able to make money through NIL brand deals, teams having the ability to recruit and court through the portal would give her pause.
“She would be turning people in, because she was somebody that was like… she’s going to follow the rules, and if you’re not going to follow them, she’s going to let somebody know, because she wanted the game to have that purity that the men’s sport has lost,” McGraw said.
And if Summitt didn't like something about the transfer portal, she would also be the first person to do something about it. “I don’t think she would like where we are right now, but I think she would be at the forefront of people saying, ‘This is where we’ve got to do this, this is how we fix it. This is the kind of legislation we need,’ and she would be trying to put in some rules and some guidelines that everybody could follow.”
NCAA coaches have voiced their concerns about the transfer portal in recent years
While the transfer portal offers athletes a lot more agency than they've had in the past, it also means coaches and schools are constantly having to re-entice players to make sure they can keep their teams together. In some ways, that's not a bad thing — it keeps schools from mistreating athletes, because it's so easy for them to leave, and it also means that programs are challenged to continue to operate at the highest possible level — but in others, it causes disruption and even animosity among teammates.
In April, North Carolina's Nyla Harris spoke to High Post Hoops about her own transfer portal process. Entering the portal at the end of the 2024-25 season gave her the ability to understand the game (and college coaches) in a different way. "I think the one thing that I can tell about a coach now that I've been through the portal experience is whether or not they're genuine," she explained. "I don't even have to be looking at them face-to-face, I can just hear it through your voice."
The portal also makes it easy to "see who really needs you and who really wants you," she added. It was clear that some schools weren't as interested in Nyla Harris the person as much as they were interested in Nyla Harris the hooper. "It's like speed dating," she joked. "You don't really take the time to get to know someone because you only have this little amount of time to be able to build a relationship and possibly visit [a school]."
But the portal isn't always that great for coaches. In March 2025, while his team was busy fighting it out on the court during March Madness, Coach Geno Auriemma (another major basketball foe of Summitt and Tennessee) admitted the portal is a kind of "big cloud" that weighs on what's still happening during the season. The timing is a huge part of the problem, he explained.
"Do you think the NBA will ever have open free agency during the NBA Playoffs? I doubt that," Auriemma told reporters. "It's got to be sometime after all this is over. It's got to be when the schools have finished playing. There's got to be some sort of way to track and monitor and penalize tampering like there is the NBA. There's got to be a guideline of what you can do in free agency, which is basically what it is."