Tulsa Men’s Basketball weathers significant roster churn for a second straight season.
With a bow on the 2025-2026 basketball season for the Golden Hurricane, Tulsa’s eyes now turn to the offseason, which promises to be an active one, with a large portion of the roster currently in flux. The transfer portal is always a whirlwind this time of year and the 2026-2027 roster is far from set. High school recruiting also promises to heat up in the coming months, but for now, all eyes are on Coach Eric Konkol and his staff as, fresh off a season where they dealt with thirteen roster departures, they are faced with a similar situation once again.
As of April 28, five players have announced their intent to enter the transfer portal from Tulsa with the window to enter now closed, although players in the portal may commit anytime. Junior point guard Tylen Riley was electric down the stretch this season, being named to the American All-Conference Second Team. He will head to Cincinnati for his final year of eligibility and land a significant payday in the process — something that has become all too common in college basketball with star players below the power conference level.
Junior guard Ade Popoola was one of the best shooters in the country, making 41% of his three pointers in his first year out of junior college. He has landed at Depaul, a Big East school, where he projects as an immediate starter whose 6-foot-5 frame and defensive prowess should help him make the jump to one of college basketball’s premier conferences. Terrence Ford Jr. has also entered the portal after never playing a game in a Tulsa uniform. He was one of the most heralded transfers that Konkol brought in last offseason after playing at an all-conference level in the Sun Belt with Arkansas State but was lost before the season began to an injury. Considering Ford was projected to start over the aforementioned Tylen Riley, it was an all-around unfortunate situation for Golden Hurricane fans who will never see him play in the Reynolds Center. He will take his talents west to Las Vegas.
Junior forward Tyler Behrend is in the portal, after a very good season that saw him come up with some huge rebounds in key spots for his team, finishing with averages of seven points and five rebounds. What he lacks in positional size he makes up for in effort, and it will be interesting to see where he finds himself next season after being a key contributor for the National Invitational Tournament runner-up. Finally, sophomore forward Ian Smikle is entering the portal. The only scholarship player to return to Tulsa from the 2024-2025 team, he was in some ways the heart and soul of the program for the last two years. Smikle started twenty-eight games as a freshman before seeing his role shrink with the emergence of Behrend.
Despite that, the Smikrowave played some of his best basketball in the postseason and gave Tulsa some much needed effort on the glass in all four games against Wichita State and 7-foot-2 center Will Berg when foul trouble became a concern for Behrend. Smikle is a high-character player with an incredible work ethic by all accounts, and though he also lacks some size at his position, he will be an asset for whichever school is lucky enough to receive his services next season as someone who makes the kind of effort plays that not everybody is willing to commit to. Looking beyond those already in the portal, there are three players still on the roster whose future has not yet been announced: Doryan Onwuekwa, a freshmen center who played in only the season opener and KJ Martin Jr, who was a consistent presence in the rotation who played a similar role to Smikle. All three are freshmen. Keep in mind that all four uncommitted players in the transfer portal can also withdraw their name and return to Tulsa, although doing so is rare, and Riley and Behrend in particular are almost certain to find themselves a pay raise by testing their luck in the portal.
Turning our attention to the remaining contributors, three players have confirmed their return to Tulsa for the coming season so far: rising sophomore Jaylen Lawal and, rising sophomore Leon Sifferlin and senior Myles Rigsby. Walk-ons Carter Benton and Cal Conroy are fully expected to return as well. Tulsa additionally has one signee in the 2026 recruiting class, Denton Forsythe, an unranked recruit from Dale, Oklahoma who nevertheless was named First-Team All State this past season, so Konkol and company have more of a foundation to build on already than they did last year.
Rigsby provides senior leadership and experience, having played in 96 games, and was a solid bench option this season. He will need to continue to improve if he is going to start consistently, particularly on the perimeter, after shooting 28% from three, although he was a 41% shooter his freshmen season at Troy, which gives reason for optimism going forward that he can score at a higher volume on the offensive end and fill in some of the outgoing production.
Lawal showed some amazing flashes as a true freshman, most notably scoring twenty-four points in just twenty-one minutes in an overtime win against Stephen F. Austin to open the NIT. He was limited by his position — he played behind second-team all American Conference point guard Tylen Riley — but was incredibly efficient on offense, averaging over seven points in only thirteen minutes per game with 43-39-79 shooting splits, which could be a sign of a massive season to come. Offseason keys for Lawal will be improving his consistency on defense and scaling his game with the kind of volume and attention from opponents he will see next year that he did not have to deal with playing behind Riley.
Sifferlin is an interesting case, an international guard from France, he played on the French national U19 team before coming to Tulsa. International prospects are difficult to judge because the European game is played in a far different style from American basketball, but Sifferlin has the tools to make a jump, and fans should look for him to carve out a consistent role in the rotation next season. Much energy will be spent analyzing those players that Tulsa brings in through the transfer portal, but do not forget about Lawal because he is perhaps as capable as anyone of filling Riley’s shoes as Tulsa’s Floor General.
Something of a wild card for the Golden Hurricane will be Carter Benton. He transferred in from Pacific University last offseason and went nearly unnoticed this year because he took a redshirt and dealt with injuries, never seeing the floor, but the local product was a 48% three point shooter in his final season at Holland Hall in Tulsa, knocking down shots at an incredible rate considering his volume. As Tulsa looks to replace combo guards Ade Popoola and Myles Barnstable, players who shot the three pointer as well as anyone in the conference this season, it would be wise not to overlook the 6-foot-4 Benton, who could break out with two offseasons under his belt at the major college level.
With only six players being known for next season’s roster at the time of writing this, there is undoubtedly much work to be done in the transfer portal for coach Konkol. There are a minimum of six scholarships to hand out and an enormous amount of production to replace. A wonderful aspect of basketball, however, is the fact that turning over a team effectively does not mean replacing every player who leaves with one who produces the exact same numbers but rather assembling a group that fits together like a puzzle and plays at a level greater than the sum of its parts even if it looks differently from previous teams.
Basketball is a team sport, and the 2026-2027 season will not be judged by individual performances but by how many games Tulsa wins. Coach Konkol knows this. His staff was in a worse position a year ago and coached Tulsa to its winningest season since 2001, so no matter what the numbers look like with whichever players they bring in, remember that a program is about more than just the players on any one of its teams, and this program is a proven winner. The roster turnover is significant, but the foundation, including some of Tulsa’s best young talent, is still here. Don’t call it a rebuild, because this program doesn’t rebuild, it reloads.
