This spring, Cal Poly sophomore Hamad Mousa, the Big West’s leading men’s basketball scorer, hit the transfer portal. The market, not surprisingly, was strong for a 6-foot-8 wing player who can dribble, pass and shoot.
The bidding started around $1.5 million for one year. As spring wore on, and Mousa remained one of the final stars in the portal left unsigned, his value increased.
Again, not surprising, for a guy at his size who averaged 20.4 points and made 84 3-pointers last season and was listed among the top 100 transfers at The Athletic. What was surprising was where Mousa decided to play next season.
Mousa will return to Cal Poly, a school that has only made the NCAA Tournament once and hasn’t had a winning record since 2013.
Coach Mike DeGeorge said his budget was about $500,000 for his entire roster. Mousa will be the highest-paid player on that roster, but for much less than he would have earned elsewhere.
The rationale for a player at a lower level of college basketball to leave for a high-major school is pretty simple. If you have a job you like but a competitor offers you significantly more than your current salary, you’re likely to take that job.
Mousa, however, viewed his decision through a different lens. Originally from Doha, Qatar, Mousa moved to Canberra, Australia, when he was 15 to train at the NBA Global Academy and then went to Dayton for his freshman season, where he barely saw the floor. “I didn’t want to leave because it would be my third school in three years,” Mousa told The Athletic. “I kind of wanted to settle down.”
Mousa also aspires to play in the NBA, and he feels like Cal Poly is the program that can get him there. The Mustangs play the fastest tempo in college basketball per KenPom and utilize a five-out system where every position is allowed to play like a guard. They do not run plays — DeGeorge’s goal is to teach them how to play — and Mousa is allowed to showcase his entire skill set.
Mousa’s family is also in a position where it could afford to play the transfer portal differently than most. His father, Yassin Mousa, had a long professional career and is currently the general manager of Al Rayyan in Qatar as well as the GM for Qatar’s 3×3 national team.
“I don’t think financially they needed to take the money the way some people would,” DeGeorge said. “And so it was really more about what was going to help him develop into a pro is their mindset.”
Mousa says at first he was even hesitant to enter the portal, but decided to when several of his teammates also entered. Once he saw most of the team was coming back — only sophomore guard Peter Bandelj ended up transferring, moving on to Nevada — the decision was pretty easy.
Cal Poly’s style of play helped convince Mousa to come back for another season. Courtesy of Cal Poly Athletics
“Most of the boys coming back gave me more motivation to come back and actually compete for a ’chip and hopefully win,” Mousa said. “Coach and people here are really great people. They really want to get you better. They really wanna make you a better person overall.”
Once Mousa told DeGeorge he’d decided to return in late May, the coach had one request: He didn’t want Mousa to announce it yet. The way Cal Poly raises money to pay its players is through scheduling “buy games,” where a high-major school essentially pays a low-major school like Cal Poly to play them and fill out their schedule. The hope for high-majors is to rack up wins against low-major schools. But when a low-major school is a threat to actually win the game, high-major schools are sometimes hesitant to play those opponents. In DeGeorge’s first two seasons, the Mustangs have beaten a Power 4 school, edging Stanford in 2024 and Utah in 2025.
So, to get the games to fund the best possible roster, DeGeorge wanted it to appear that Cal Poly’s team might not be as good, which meant allowing other schools to believe Mousa wasn’t returning. That wasn’t that hard considering the market for Mousa’s services.
“The way the timeline worked out,” DeGeorge said, “is not ideal for your stress level.”
The hardest jobs in college basketball coaching are at the low- and mid-major levels. It’s almost inevitable that when they find and develop a good player, he’s eventually going to leave. And while they have him, they’re in constant fear of him leaving.
“It is very challenging because you get to the end of the season and you immediately go into this period of unknown,” DeGeorge said. “It’s the thing I like least about my job if I’m being honest. It’s just this uncertainty and not necessarily having a great way to solve the problem. Problems are our job, and you gotta figure out how to solve problems, but these weren’t problems we could solve.”
DeGeorge was fortunate to have only three players enter the portal this spring, and while he learned the fates of the first two fairly quickly — one stayed and one left — the wait for Mousa kept dragging, with the offers continually increasing.
“Every week we just felt like, ‘Oh, next week we’ll know more, next we’ll know more,’” DeGeorge said. “And it went on for months.”
Once Mousa decided to stay with the Mustangs, it meant 13 of their 14 scholarship players would be back for the 2026-27 season.
In explaining his decision, Mousa repeated some form of competing for a conference championship three times. That’s his goal next season and a big reason he’s back, which is not that unusual for a college basketball player to say, but it is at Cal Poly. The school last won a regular-season conference title in 1996, and that was in a league with four teams. In the six years before DeGeorge arrived, the Mustangs averaged 1.7 wins per season in conference play.
With that context, what DeGeorge has accomplished in his first two seasons — an 18-22 record in Big West play — inspires hope, especially considering he had the least experienced roster in the conference both years, per KenPom.com’s tracking.
That will not be the case in 2026-27. Cal Poly is the only team in the league returning at least four starters, and Mousa is the only player on an All-Big West team with remaining eligibility to return. (The other three All-Big West players transferred to high-major programs.)
“I do believe in this group,” DeGeorge said. “I think we’ve got a chance to have a breakthrough year.”
The Mustangs returned 13 of their 14 scholarship players for this upcoming season. Courtesy of Cal Poly Athletics
If success really does follow, Cal Poly’s roster might eventually get raided by bigger schools. DeGeorge tries to combat that by running a fast-paced, fun offense that allows everyone to be a playmaker, and by building “trust and relationships” with his players.
In early February during conference play, he called a meeting to tell his players he wanted them all back and wasn’t going to “pick and choose” who he would try to retain. “I think it kind of put everybody at ease that it wasn’t going to be this painful process for them to go through,” DeGeorge said.
The Mustangs got hot soon after, winning five of their final seven conference games after a 5-8 start in the Big West.
When the season ended, DeGeorge continued to be transparent with his process. He followed an NBA-like model by assigning value based on a combination of production, role in his system and what the market value would be to replace each particular player. For instance, a skilled small-ball center who can guard all five positions is extremely valuable in his system because the Mustangs want every player on the floor to be able to dribble, pass and shoot.
DeGeorge couldn’t afford to retain his entire roster, so he determined the number of players he could pay, divided the amounts based on his production/role/market value formula and then shared his offer with each player’s agent. Each time, DeGeorge said, the agents came back and said they thought their player had more market value than what DeGeorge was offering.
“I think you’re right,” DeGeorge said he told each agent. “I’m sure that’s true, but this is the money we have. Kind of take it or leave it.”
DeGeorge says he adjusted for one player but held his ground on everyone else, and they all returned. At Cal Poly, he’s only had one player transfer. Since moving from Division III to Division II in 2018 — DeGeorge coached for six seasons at Colorado Mesa — he’s had only two transfers.
“It’s refreshing,” DeGeorge said. “People are so critical of young people for what’s happening with the transfer portal. They always present as if these players are selfish, and first of all, they’re not being selfish. The market is what it is, and if they have market value, they have a right to explore that. They aren’t creating these rules. … They’re being capitalists, and that’s who we are as a country.”
When Mousa talks about his return, he focuses on what Cal Poly has done for him and how much he loves it there. “I don’t want to leave this place because it feels like home, man,” he said. “I’m happy. I’m really happy to come back and play with the boys again.”
Mousa is also well aware of the success stories at mid-majors in California. He mentions Jalen Williams at Santa Clara and Ajay Mitchell at UC Santa Barbara, who both won an NBA championship in 2025 with the Oklahoma City Thunder.
“It’s possible,” Mousa said. “You just gotta go out there and try to win games and be me.”
