Michigan Treats Basketball Recruits Like Depreciating Capital

LJ Cason averaged 8.

He entered the transfer portal last week. The story that matters is about what Michigan has become under Juwan Howard, not about a bench player's modest ambitions.

Michigan cycled through six basketball coaches in fifteen years before Howard arrived in 2019. That kind of turnover would crush most programs. Howard converted it into method—he began recruiting knowing the roster would be radically reconstructed annually, not as a failure of retention but as operational strategy.

You recruit talented freshmen and modest contributors like Cason on the understanding that next year's class might render you expendable. You are not promised development or a path to minutes—you are promised a year, maybe two, on a roster in permanent flux. The best players leave early for the NBA. The mid-tier players either accept the churn or they leave themselves.

The moment you signal that tenure is fiction, people start acting like vendors instead of members.

This is not unique to Michigan, but Michigan systemized it. Auburn did something similar under Tony Barbee in the mid-2010s—he treated the portal as a permanent feature rather than an emergency release valve. Every recruiting class was implicitly final. Each recruit has a useful shelf life. You treat players like capital with depreciation schedules, extract value immediately, supplement constantly. Never commit to development because commitment costs resources you can deploy on the next cycle.

This is how institutions that cannot count on permanence actually work. Not just in sports. In every field where you depend on people, the moment you signal that tenure is fiction, people start acting like vendors instead of members. They optimize for individual transactions. They stop investing in the place itself.

Your creative practice works the same way. So does your career. The moment you internalize that you are temporary, you become disposable.