SAN DIEGO – Much like Deion Sanders in football, Rick Pitino has developed a bit of a reputation for himself in this new era of men’s college basketball.
He’s a Hall of Famer who pioneered the art of flipping a team roster and becoming king of the transfer portal, following a blueprint similar to the one used by Sanders, the football coach at Colorado.
The big difference so far is sustained results. Pitino has revived St. John’s with three straight winning seasons, including a second straight NCAA Tournament appearance, this time as a No. 5 seed here against Northern Iowa on Friday, March 20.
“We don’t build through the high school ranks,” Pitino said Thursday. “We build through the portal. And we keep the ones we want coming back, and the ones that want to leave should leave.”
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If that sounds familiar, Sanders said something like it when he was hired at Colorado in December 2022. He told his inherited players to “go ahead and jump in that portal” to make way for change.
Pitino effectively did the same when hired at St. John’s in March 2023. He brought in 10 transfer players and two freshmen on a roster of 14 that finished with a 20-13 record but fell short of the NCAA Tournament.
Check him out now. He revived a dormant program and could make a run in the tournament at age 73, largely due to this peculiar roster-building strategy.
How Rick Pitino built his St. John’s roster
Pitino has landed one of the nation’s top-five transfer classes the past two years, including the nation’s No. 1 transfer class with seven players in 2025-26, according to 247Sports. One of them was Ian Jackson, a guard who ranked second in the team in scoring at North Carolina (11.9 points per game) before transferring to St. John’s.
“I came here to learn,” Jackson told USA TODAY.
That’s a common refrain among transfer recruits. Pitino has won more than 900 games in college, in addition to having coached in the NBA.
“When I came on my visit, I was star-struck, like I was meeting a celebrity, which I pretty much was, 100%,” said senior forward Dillon Mitchell, a transfer from Cincinnati.
The end result is a 15-player roster this season that lists nine transfers, four freshmen and two returning sophomores from Portugal and Greece. The team is led by Big East Conference player of the year Zuby Ejiofor, a senior who transferred from Kansas in Pitino’s first class in 2023 and now leads the team in four categories: 16.3 points per game, 7.1 rebounds per game, 119 assists and 73 blocks.
“I don’t think I’ve enjoyed coaching a player as much since 1987, when I coached Billy Donovan (at Providence),” Pitino said of Ejiofor. “And I’m going to miss him terribly. And I’m just going to appreciate him while I have him.”
Rick Pitino interviews each transfer recruit
Pitino’s success has reignited the college basketball scene in New York, where the Red Storm play in Madison Square Garden.
Before Pitino, St. John’s had sunk to as low as an 8-24 finish in 2016 and hadn’t been to the NCAA Tournament since 2019. Pitino’s first-round NCAA tournament victory last year against Omaha was the school’s first since 2000, which also helped erase memories of his own scandal-plagued past at Louisville before he moved on to Iona.
Such a quick turn of events is easier these days with the transfer portal, where new coaches can remake a roster overnight, unlike before 2021, when transfer players were required to sit out a year before playing at their new schools.
But few have been as good at it as Pitino. Sanders, a Pro Football Hall of Famer, took over a football team that was 1-11 at Colorado in 2022 before he flipped the roster in 2023. He brought in more than 45 transfer players out of a roster limit of 85 and finished 4-8 in Year 1. He then finished 9-4 in 2024 and 3-9 in 2025.
In Pitino’s case, he’s changed his portal strategy a bit and got a big return on his investment this year.
“This year we just went after culture guys, guys that we felt were really going to play for the name on the front, not worried about stats or making it somewhere else,” Pitino told USA TODAY Sports Thursday. “Just totally bought in. And we spent so much time interviewing and researching every individual from Dillon Mitchell, to (forward) Bryce Hopkins, to (guard) Dylan Darling, to (guard) Oziyah Sellers. Every single guy we did our homework and beyond that. And we got great culture guys. And it’s paid off very well for us.”
Follow reporter Brent Schrotenboer @Schrotenboer. Email: bschrotenb@usatoday.com
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: What does Rick Pitino have in common with Deion Sanders? Portal madness
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