Despite Portal Madness, Porter Moser is Still Trying to Build Oklahoma From the Ground Up

The OU basketball coach still strives to rely on building his roster through the high school ranks, though the transfer portal will always loom in the background.

AMARILLO, TX — For the second straight offseason, Porter Moser is having to cobble together a roster through the transfer portal.

A year ago, the carnage on the OU basketball roster was so bad, Moser got a punchy nickname just after he arrived.

Once again, he’s having to live up to the name, though he’s not happy about it.

“They call me Portal Moser,” the Sooner basketball coach said on Tuesday night at the OU Coaches Caravan stop in Amarillo, TX. “I don’t like it. I don’t want to be called it. But you have to balance it.”

But in the modern era of college basketball, Moser acknowledged that embracing the portal is a necessary part of the job.

“I don’t want to build a whole team through transfers,” he said. “I want to balance it. We have to be up with the times with transfers because this league was the number one basketball league in the country by far and it was very old.”

So far, Moser has added former George Washington guard Joe Bamisile.

But with Umoja Gibson, Elijah Harkless, Rich Issanza, Alston Mason and Akol Mawein opting to enter the transfer portal at the end of the season, Moser still has work to do.

While assembling a large part of the roster through the transfer portal can be a headache for Moser, he said he feels worst for the fans who want to invest in the team from year to year.

Porter Moser :: Denny Medley / Big 12 Conference

“I feel for the fans in this respect,” Moser said. “… As fans, you start to relate and identify with the athletes that you pull for. And what I worry for is the fans is these kids that come and go.”

Though no coach can turn their backs on the transfer portal, Moser still strives to build the bulk of his roster from the ground up through recruiting high school athletes.

“I still want to develop young kids. So we signed four freshman,” Moser said. “We signed two ESPN top 60 freshmen, Otega Oweh who’s just 6-4, really athletic and I love him. And then Milos Uzan who is a top five point guard in the country, 6-4, great vision.

“We signed the Gatorade Player of the Year in Missouri. He’s 6-11, 230 (pounds), Luke Northweather. And then we signed a 6-7 freshman coming from Germany (Benjamin Schroder). He’s the number two ranked European coming over.”

Once Moser gets the freshman on campus, that’s where the real work begins.

The OU head coach will be hard at work to develop the youngsters, but he will also have to stay cognizant of how each player is enjoying life in his program.

“Those are young kids that you’ve got to almost recruit daily because it might not happen right away,” he said. “And that’s the balance college coaches have across the country right now is so many people want instant gratification. And if you don’t get that, people are in their ears telling them to move on.”

Moser felt he did a good job laying the foundation for his program in Year 1 last year, and now as he enters the 2022-23 season, he’ll have an opportunity to build on that progress with a whole new slate of freshman as the Sooners work to get back into the NCAA Tournament yet again. 

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