Inside The Huskies

Menifield Settles On a New Team and It Wasn't Washington

The freshman guard had six options, three of whom were NCAA participants.

Dan Raley

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Over two weeks time, Keyon Menifield Jr. went from returning to the University of Washington basketball team to entering the transfer portal but leaving the door slightly ajar to coming back — to a firm goodbye.

On Tuesday, the 6-foot-1 guard from Flint, Michigan, announced on social media he will join Arkansas, an NCAA Tournament team that upset No. 1 seed Kansas 72-71 before getting eliminated by eventual national champion Connecticut 88-65.

Menfield, described by some who saw him play as a freshman as the quickest player in college basketball, was a hotly pursued guard once in the portal and he chose the Razorbacks (22-14) over five other schools.

The losers in the Menifield sweepstakes were Alabama (31-6), Tennessee (25-11), Ohio State (16-19), Louisville (4-28) and the UW (16-16).

A 10-point scorer for the Huskies, he joins an Eric Mussleman-coached Arkansas team that just lost two of its top three scorers in Ricky Council IV (16.1) and Nick Smith Jr. (12.8), who declared for the NBA Draft.

Menifield is one of up to six UW players who either have entered the transfer portal or are considering it, with PJ Fuller's intentions still not verified.

While some Husky fans might feel Menifield is being disloyal by leaving, he leaves an unstable basketball program that hasn't been to the NCAAs in four seasons, has had just one winning season over that time and has a coach in Mike Hopkins who is on the hot seat to the point the school had to publicly declare it was bringing him back.

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Dan Raley
DAN RALEY

Dan Raley has worked for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, as well as for MSN.com and Boeing, the latter as a global aerospace writer. His sportswriting career spans four decades and he's covered University of Washington football and basketball during much of that time. In a working capacity, he's been to the Super Bowl, the NBA Finals, the MLB playoffs, the Masters, the U.S. Open, the PGA Championship and countless Final Fours and bowl games.

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