Over the past five years, we’ve come to lean on churn as a form of shorthand to describe what unfolds across college hoops. It wasn’t inaccurate, either. The transfer portal, implementation of NIL, and extra years of eligibility bestowed during the pandemic did usher annual reshuffling across the sport.
Yet churn is also imprecise. Sure, players changed teams, but their output remained. This spring, though, the last batch of super seniors exhausted their eligibility. And churn doesn’t begin to describe the outflow. Turnover is probably better, but it undersells the scale of production that programs need to replace.