Big East Roundup: Runner-Up Creighton Raids Transfer Portal

This is one in a series of stories covering roster changes around the Big East heading into the 2025-26 college basketball season.

After making the Big East Championship game on the way to a Second Round finish in the NCAA Tournament, the Creighton Blue Jays lost all four of their top scorers from 2024-25 in the offseason. Center (and centerpiece) Ryan Kalkbrenner graduated, as did Jamiya Neal and Steven Ashworth; Pop Isaacs, who went down with a season-ending injury on the eve of conference play, departed for the transfer portal.

The loss of those senior talents could create growing pains for the Blue Jays, but they managed to bring in the second-best transfer class in the Big East to compensate. As such, pundits predict another NCAA Tournament finish as head coach Greg McDermott enters his 16th season.

Other departures include Sami Osmani, Mason Miller, Larry Johnson and Frederick King, all of whom played sparingly or not at all last season. The Blue Jays currently have 16 players on their roster: with a hard limit of 15 scholarship spots in a recent NCAA rule change, they may hope to grandfather in former walk-on Josh Townley-Thomas in order to comply with the rule.

Creighton returns two starters from last season, 6-foot-8, 230 pound junior forward Jasen Green (4.9 points and 3.2 rebounds along with excellent defense in 20.3 minutes per game) and 6-foot-10, 220 pound sophomore forward Jason McAndrew (7.8 points, 4.4 rebounds in 21.8 minutes per game).

6-foot-10, 225 pound junior Isaac Traudt and 6-foot-6, 215 pound sophomore guard Fedor Zugic, a native of Montenegro, are the Blue Jays’ main returning bench players. Rising sophomores Ty Davis and Shane Thomas, both listed at 6-foot-3 and 195 pounds, could also jostle for playing time.

Transfer Takeover

Creighton’s 12th-ranked transfer class serves as the headliner of their offseason, as they managed to bring in a quintet of four-star transfers. Senior guard Nik Graves scored 17.5 points per game with the Charlotte 49ers despite shooting a subpar 61-of-186 from three.

6-foot-8 guard Blake Harper put up 19.5 points and 6.2 rebounds per game in his freshman season at Howard while sinking 40.4 percent of his threes, making him a potential nightmare on the perimeter.

Josh Dix, a 6-foot-6 senior guard, transferred in from Iowa’s where he averaged 14.4 points per game and made 42.2 percent of his 154 three-point attempts, while rising sophomore and former top 50 recruit Austin Swartz came off the bench in his first season at Miami.

Owen Freeman, another Hawkeyes transfer, stands 6-foot-10 and averaged 16.7 points and 6.7 rebounds per game before missing the last six weeks of the season. A rising junior, he retains two seasons of eligibility. 6-foot-10 forward Liam McChesney, formerly of High Point, didn’t play last season but averaged 6.5 points and 3.2 rebounds across 18.6 minutes per game during the 2023-24 campaign.

The Blue Jays also recruited four-star Hudson Greer, ESPN’s No. 41 recruit in the class of 2025, a 6-foot-6 wing and lauded three-point shooter who averaged 22.4 points, 7.4 rebounds and 2.2 steals per game in his junior year of high school, prompting him to transfer to Florida’s prestigious Monteverde Academy. In a late bid to round out their roster, the Blue Jays headed overseas in August to bring in freshman recruits like the 6-foot-10 Kerem Konan (Turkey) and 7-foot-1 center Aleksa Dimitrijevic (Serbia).