The way things went for Penn State men’s basketball in 2025-26 was not surprising. While those affiliated with the program will tell you they didn’t meet expectations, I bet if you gave them truth serum, they’d tell you that what happened was a feature, not a bug.

In college basketball, nobody will ever admit that they are going into a season fully expecting to be one of the worst teams in their conference, especially in the Big Ten. While Penn State isn’t close to a college basketball blue blood, it still has more resources and a larger footprint than the vast majority of Division I. The problem was that, compared to the rest of its conference, which has an argument of being the best in the sport, it probably had the smallest pocketbook.

After all, Penn State was extremely inactive in last year’s transfer portal despite losing most of its roster. Its coach is one of the lowest-paid in the conference. It occasionally fishes for big recruits and transfers, but usually gets outbid. As long as you’re in that position in your conference, you have to be shrewd to get out in front.

That’s exactly what Micah Shrewsberry did to build the 2022-23 Nittany Lions, who were a few minutes from the program’s third-ever Sweet Sixteen berth. Sure, the program had a foundation with the likes of Seth Lundy, Myles Dread, and a sneakily strong recruiting class that was headlined by Kanye Clary, but it found underutilized players from small schools in the early days of the transfer portal.

Jalen Pickett was signed out of Siena in 2021 and took a major leap in his final collegiate season. All-Patriot League sharpshooter Andrew Funk came in from Bucknell. All-CAA guard Camren Wynter came in from Drexel and held down a role in the starting backcourt. They even found a bench piece in the portal from Denver in Michael Henn.

While the other three held down supporting roles, Pickett put the team on his back all season long with one of the most legendary single-season runs in program history, leading the team to eight wins in nine games down the stretch that only halted with a close loss to Zach Edey and Purdue in the Big Ten Championship Game. By the time Penn State made the NCAA Tournament, it was Funk who etched his name into Penn State lore forever.

That team was full of seniors, and once the Nittany Lions fell to No. 2 Texas in the second round, it had to pick up the scraps, especially after Shrewsberry bolted for Notre Dame. Mike Rhoades took the job and looked to import his old VCU squad to State College with mixed results over the course of two years, but ultimately underachieved. He was forced to remake the roster for 2025-26 once again.

Once again faced with the reality of having some of the fewest resources of any Big Ten basketball program, Rhoades elected not to roll the dice on mid-major talent that would merely be mercenaries but elected to try an old-school approach by building a team from the ground up.

In theory, it’s not a bad idea. If you were able to properly develop several recruits to the point that they become All-Big Ten-caliber by the time they’re juniors or seniors, it’ll be much more manageable for a program with a resource disadvantage to compete in a conference like the Big Ten.

And so, Penn State elected to fill seven of its nine open roster spots with incoming freshmen for 2025-26, headlined by the highest-ranked recruit in program history, Kayden Mingo. Rhoades also earned commitments from four-star Mason Blackwood, three-stars Reggie Grodin and Justin Houser, and a trio of international recruits: Ivan Jurić, Tibor Mirtič, and Melih Tunca.

If things went to plan, 2025-26 would have merely been a year of growing pains for a freshman class that would learn how to play together after a few years in a college system. In another life, Penn State could’ve been a shining beacon in the transfer portal era of a team that was built from the ground up with guys who lived and breathed Penn State.

But that’s not the state of the sport in 2026. Just over a month after the season came to an end, four of those seven freshmen, including the three highest-rated, are gone. Jurić, Mirtič, and the redshirting Grodin are all that remains. Mingo and Blackwood, two of the highest-rated commits in program history, will go down as having only spent one year in Happy Valley before moving on.

The misery of the 2025-26 basketball season could’ve been justified if it was used as a rebuilding year, but now? It’s a lost year. Jurić is the only one of Penn State’s eight leading scorers who is due to return for 2026-27, wiping out the progress that Rhoades and his staff looked to accomplish with his roster management strategy entering the season.

This can all be a valuable lesson to Penn State men’s basketball as it tries to move forward and rebuild the roster for next season. The old way is dead in college basketball. Developing is no longer the way to build a program. Michigan’s starting lineup was made up entirely of transfers, using a cash infusion to turn a destitute, bottom-of-the-barrel program into a national powerhouse in just two years. The Wolverines are the gold standard for turnarounds, no matter how unrealistically high they’ve set the bar.

The strategy is going to have to change to make Penn State competitive in basketball. You can’t ignore recruiting, of course, but unless you get someone who’s program-changing right away, you’re risking that player leaving for a better situation as soon as possible. We all love the story of a guy who sticks with a program through thick and thin throughout his collegiate career, but those players are becoming rarer and rarer in sports like these.

Rhoades has gotten off to a good start in this transfer portal cycle, already earning more commitments than he did last year and going back to the mold of grabbing mid-major talent. It might not be the most pleasing route, but it’s the most functional to get the program to a point where it isn’t being outdrawn by several other winter sports.

Penn State wanted to do something admirable in building this program the old-fashioned way, but they’ve learned the hard way that college sports, and especially college basketball, have reached a point of no return.