College Basketball Recruiting: Grad Transfer Ryan Betley is coming to Cal

One of Cal's biggest transfer targets has made his decision, and it's blue and gold!

The same day after we published an article fretting about Cal’s potentially thin guard rotation, Mark Fox successfully secured the services of Ryan Betley, a grad transfer from Penn.

Ryan Betley @RyanBetley

One more year! Let’s get it 🐻🐻🐻

What will Betley bring to Cal? Well, I can start by quoting myself:

If he came, he’d be following in the increasingly long line of Ivy League grad transfers to Cal, and there’s a solid chance that his game would be pretty similar to Grant Mullins and Dwight Tarwater, in that Betley would be a 3-and-D wing. That’s not far from what Betley did at Penn, with 60% of his shots coming from three and a correspondingly low rate of drawing fouls. And, as noted above, he’s a solid rebounder for his size (methinks that Mark Fox likes guys who can pull down a board).

Now that he’s Berkeley-bound, it’s worth going into a bit more detail. Here’s his shooting splits from last season at Penn in the Ivy League:

What you see are the kinds of splits you would expect from an Ivy League guard - he didn’t take a ton of shots at the rim, but when he did he made them count, and the majority of his shots were assisted threes. I somewhat lazily compared him to Grant Mullins above, in that they are both grad transfer shooting guards from an Ivy League school, and there’s something to the comparison. Mullins was a touch better as a shooter and a passer and played a little point guard, but Betley is more efficient at the rim and a better rebounder.

As is always the case for mid-major grad transfers, there are questions about how his game will translate to a power conference. But if he can bring to Cal something approximating what he brought to Penn - good shooting, low turnover play on offense, and solid defensive rebounding - then he’ll be a valuable player.

Cal still has two open scholarships to (presumably) fill and I’m sure they’re going hard for a point guard, but filling one open slot with a solid player at a position of need will cause Cal fans everywhere to let out a huge sigh of relief.

Welcome to Cal Ryan!