The transfer portal for women’s college basketball officially opened on Monday, the day after the national championship game that saw UCLA stomping out South Carolina, 79-51. Apparently, “on Monday” meant “midnight Eastern,” as shortly after that border passed, On3’s Talia Goodman reported that Marquette forward Skylar Forbes is in the portal.
A quick check of Goodman’s Portal Tracker over at On3.com on Monday morning shows us that not only is Forbes listed for Marquette, but so is forward Jada Bediako. No social media posts for either woman, just the On3 notation and reporting.
Forbes has been with Marquette for three seasons, originally signing to play for Megan Duffy and then staying over after the coaching change to Cara Consuegra. She was Marquette’s leading scorer in each of Consuegra’s two seasons in charge, finishing at 15.5 points, 4.9 rebounds, 2.3 assists, 1.0 steals, and a Big East best 1.8 blocks per game this past season. 2025-26 was an odd season for Forbes and the weirdness may have been tied to the disappearance of assistant coach Khadijah Rushdan in the middle of the year. We can’t help but notice the coincidence that the game that Forbes missed for what was called personal reasons also happens to be the first game where Rushdan was no longer on the bench for the Golden Eagles. After that, Forbes came off the bench for the next five games, and when asked about it, Consuegra said it was a tactic to help Forbes be able to see how the game was unfolding before she got a chance to play in it.
To be clear: She averaged 16.2 points, 3.8 rebounds, 2.0 assists, 1.0 steals, and 2.4 blocks per game in 27 minutes on average in that stretch. She was roughly as productive in that run as she was on average for the rest of the season even though her minutes were down about four from her season long average. Go figure.
The point is thus: Is Forbes transferring now after having two very obvious breaking points — a coaching change and then one year after a coaching change after you see how the new coach works — related to Whatever That Was? Seems like we can put two and two together to draw a conclusion of four pretty easily, but because we still don’t know what all happened there precisely, we’re really just guessing.
Bediako was brought in as a transfer from Georgia Tech by Consuegra after she was hired in the spring of 2024. Her time in Milwaukee was clearly more productive than her time in Atlanta, but seeing as she started the first two games of Consuegra’s tenure and then saw her minutes drop from that year to this year…. yeah, you can see why she might want a little bit more for her final year of eligibility. Perhaps we should have seen this coming when Bediako didn’t play at all in Marquette’s final two games of the season and didn’t crack double digit minutes since the mid-January home loss to Georgetown. She averaged 2.6 points and 2.2 rebounds for Marquette this year for a two year average of 2.3 points and 2.3 rebounds in 9.9 minutes per appearance.
And now, the brand new scholarship chart. Brace yourself…..
Yep, Marquette now has five projected players for 2026-27. Five players and 10 available spots. One of the projected players is the only freshman that Consuegra signed in November even though she had eight seniors listed on the 2025-26 roster. In other words: We were looking at a massive transfer portal situation this spring at the time, and now it is much worse. One of the projected players is JJ Barnes, who is coming off a preseason practice knee injury, so it’s unclear as to exactly how ready she’ll be by the first Monday in November. One of the projected players is Kam Herring, who played a total of 48 minutes as a freshman this past season.
The good news is that Cara Consuegra knew she was going to have to do a bunch of heavy lifting in the transfer portal months ago. The question is how much did what transpired over the past five months create more lifting for her to do? Perhaps an even bigger question: Is Consuegra going to be able to assemble an NCAA tournament-caliber roster on the fly this spring after missing the Field of 68 in both of her first two seasons on the Marquette sideline?
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