The Akron Zips: An Anomaly in the Portal

Akron defies NIL trends, keeping top players and coach John Groce. Learn how culture and strategy keep the Zips competitive in college basketball.

If you are a fan of a school outside of the power conferences, there is a reasonable chance that your coach has been picked up by a different school if they are successful and if you had any players that have any remotely average potential…they are probably in the portal. It’s a bit of a bleak time right now. However, there is one school that’s defying the odds and returning their excellent coach and their eligible players. The Akron Zips.

Across social media, players such as Nate and Tavari Johnson started to post these images:

All key players for the Zips that had remaining years of eligibility are returning to Akron next season under head coach John Groce. How? How in this world of NIL, the open portal, chaotic coaching carousels, and what seems to be constant drama are the Akron Zips going to be near the top in returning minutes next season.

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Culture

Putting it bluntly, John Groce is a winner. In 17 seasons as a head coach, he’s finished below .500 just three times, one each at Ohio, Illinois, and Akron. Even though his time at Illinois wasn’t stellar, he still made the NCAA Tournament once and was ranked in three of the five seasons.

He’s turned his career into building a dynasty in Akron. He’s 168-88 in eight seasons, he’s won the MAC twice, the MAC tournament three times, earning a bid to the NCAA Tournament as a 13-seed twice and a 14-seed once. In KenPom, they finished 255th in year one, but since they’ve finished around the 100ish mark while hitting 70-80 throughout different points in the seasons.

Coming into this season, the Zips retained just 23.9% of the minutes continuity which placed them at 250th. The year prior, they retained 54.7% which put them at 70th. This isn’t the first time that Groce has been able to retain talent, but he also knows how to rebuild quickly as he’s shown following the team’s loss of Enrique Freeman and Ali Ali coming into this year.

We’ve talked a lot about coaches that stay and build legitimate programs at their schools. Examples include: John Becker at the University of Vermont, Rick Byrd at Belmont, and Greg Kampe at Oakland. You can throw Mark Few in there too if you want for what he’s done for Gonzaga. Needless to say, there are some coaches who are simply program builders, and John Groce has done just that at Akron and it doesn’t look like it’s slowing down anytime soon.

NIL

Alright, there’s no denying they had some help from NIL here. I don’t have a specific value for you, but it’s been known for a while that Akron has the most NIL in the MAC. Some have said it’s in the range of $300-$400k, but I don’t have confirmation on the validity behind that. It’s reasonable to assume that it could be the case considering what other schools of a similar size have.

If the value I mentioned is true, then there’s nothing stopping power schools from handing out a single $200k contract to Akron’s top players to pull them away. Taking the estimated value, you could have a breakout that looks something like this for Akron:

• Top 3 players: $50-75k

• Next 4-5 players: $25-50k

• The rest: $10-15k

In today’s world, the thought of a non-power conference school being able to retain their players even with a solid NIL chest is mind-blowing. However, notice the “Wentz Financial Group” logo in the photo I pasted above? Teams sure can stay competitive with it. However, I do believe that a school with strong culture, combined with reasonable NIL funds can succeed.

There was nothing stopping players like Nate and Tavari Johnson or Shannon Young from going out and securing what would most likely be significantly larger NIL deals than what they received at Akron. However, they elected return to run it back after a successful season. It should give many other teams across this country hope that good things can still happen.

Of course, it’s important to remember that I wasn’t in the room when these deals happened. The NIL funding could be dramatically higher than what’s been mentioned in passing and maybe the deals for the top players are astronomically higher than I’m assuming.

What do you think? Do you think there are going to be more teams like Akron that figure out the right combination of facilitating a strong culture with NIL? Can more teams convince players that the grass isn’t always greener?

We posted this article last week, talking about how multi-year contracts could help control the transfer portal. If you are interested in learning more about the state of the world in college basketball with NIL, I’d encourage you to check it out: