Transfer portal: Villanova adds another 2025 recruit; Drexel, La Salle, Temple add players

The roster rebuild at Villanova under new coach Kevin Willard has had its ups and downs, but one consistent facet has been acquiring players with multiple seasons of eligibility remaining. The Wildcats appear eager to buck the national trend and build something sustainable.

Whether it works out remains to be seen, but Villanova added another player of that ilk Monday night, when class of 2025 center Nico Onyekwere committed to Willard and the Wildcats. Onyekwere, a 7-foot-1 center, initially signed with Florida State but reopened his recruitment after coach Leonard Hamilton retired.

Onyekwere, 18, figures to be a developmental piece for the 2025-26 season. Villanova has senior transfer Duke Brennan (Grand Canyon) and redshirt freshman transfer Braden Pierce (Maryland) ahead of him on the depth chart. Onyekwere, a native Nigerian, attends Long Island Lutheran High School in New York. He briefly played professionally in Germany at age 16.

Onyekwere has not spent enough time in the U.S. to be a nationally rated and ranked recruit. What’s known about him is that he is big, and at Villanova, big has been a rarity. Pierce became the first 7-footer on the roster in 20 years.

Villanova now has two 7-footers with four seasons of eligibility remaining.

Onyekwere gives the Wildcats 10 players on the current roster. At the very least, they can now practice five-on-five. They are still looking to add more talent and remain in the running for 2025 point guard Acaden Lewis even after picking up a commitment last week from point guard Devin Askew, a sixth-year transfer on his fifth school.

Askew and Brennan are the only two players on the 10-man roster so far with expiring eligibility after this season. The other eight have at least two seasons.

Onyekwere is the second class of 2025 addition, joining combo guard Chris Jeffrey, who initially committed to Willard at Maryland.

No Big 5 team has been busier than La Salle. The Explorers, under new coach Darris Nichols, have one of the biggest roster makeovers in college hoops. Fifteen of their 16 rostered players from the 2024-25 season have entered the portal.

Nichols and his staff worked quickly, and La Salle has already added 10 players via the portal.

The latest is a significant one. The Explorers on Sunday picked up a commitment from William & Mary transfer Noah Collier, a Mullica Hill and Westtown School product who originally began his career at Pittsburgh. Collier, a 6-8 forward, scored 12.2 points and grabbed 5 rebounds per game last season.

He spent two seasons at Pittsburgh before transferring to William & Mary, where he was for the last three years. Collier received a medical redshirt for the 2023-24 season and has an additional year because of the pandemic. Thus, the 2025-26 season will be his sixth year in college basketball.

Collier figures to start and be a key player on the Explorers.

After losing its four top scorers to the transfer portal, Drexel is on the board with a portal pickup of its own.

The Dragons got a commitment Monday from Eastern Michigan transfer Dillon Tingler, a 6-7 wing who was a three-star prospect out of Huntington Expression Prep in West Virginia a year ago. Tingler played 12 minutes per game as a freshman and scored 1.3 points while adding 1.6 rebounds per contest in his limited action.

Before committing to Eastern Michigan, Tingler had offers from Akron, Bucknell, Penn, and others.

» READ MORE: Drexel star Amaris Baker is getting one more season of college basketball

Temple also was raided by the portal, resulting in the loss of a few key returning players. However, the Owls have begun to backfill some of their departures, and they picked up three portal commitments over the last week.

They are: Bowling Green big man Jamai Felt; Nebraska wing Gavin Griffiths; and Manhattan guard Masiah Gilyard.

Temple had just four scholarship players on its roster before last week, so there’s still some work to do to build out the 2025-26 lineup. This is a good start, though. Felt was on the All-MAC freshman team. Griffiths, who started his career at Rutgers, has been at two Big Ten schools. And Gilyard scored 11.2 points per game while being one of the best rebounding guards (7.3 per game) in the nation last season.

» READ MORE: Temple lands commitment from former Oregon State and Idaho QB Gevani McCoy