The concern is can you maintain the program given the recruiting sanctions. Yes its too late for this year to transfer, but long term, is this going to be a team that is an NCAA participant on a regular basis. If not, I don't blame a player at all for taking advantage of the transfer rule. If I am a sophomore or even a junior, I would take a hard look at the portal.
There could always be a cascading effect where players start to transfer then others read the writing on the wall and leave but unless that happens I'm not sure why the juniors would leave due to the recruiting restrictions. The restrictions probably won't have a big effect on the 2020 class because of the small numbers to start with, and pretty much the entire team would return next year (losing Banks and Phillips), so we would likely have a good shot at the NCAAT next year anyways.
For the others, they might transfer, but it's not like any of them committed under the impression we were a guaranteed NCAAT to begin with. To some degree you would think they came here with the idea of helping to build it. Now they might view that as an unlikely task due to the restrictions, or it might galvanize them around the coach. Hard to get into the heads of players in this situation.
As far as being an NCAAT team on a regular basis, beyond the threat of transfers, the biggest concern is being able to land a good, big, class in 2021 to build around. If we somehow can then I think we will have weathered the storm pretty well. Fortunately, in a big class, if you can land a player or two early, you can potentially have a snowball effect help things and/or have committed players do some recruiting themselves.
