Boynton Gets Proven Shooter for 2020-21 Season in Transfer Ferron Flavors

Mike Boynton has a ton of intriguing pieces for his 2020-21 roster, but not many are proven pieces.

Isaac Likekele is proven, as is Yor Anei. Kalib Boone and Avery Anderson had bright spots as freshmen last season, but other than that there isn’t a whole lot of evidence to suggest how good the rest of OSU’s roster will be at the college level. Well, apart from Ferron Flavors Jr.

The Cowboys lost 83 percent of their 3-point makes from last season to graduation, so picking up a 3-point specialist was important for OSU. Boynton found his man in Flavors, a transfer from Cal Baptist, who has hit 188 3s in two seasons of Division I basketball.

“Just an overarching recruiting approach, it starts with your roster,” Boynton said. “Everything starts with who you actually have and then what you are gonna try to accomplish and how you are gonna try to do it. Obviously for us, we saw a glaring need to replace the guys we were losing with some guys who are proven.”

With the Lancers last season, Flavors hit 93 3s. That’s 17 more than Thomas Dziagwa hit for OSU this past season. He has averaged double figures in scoring in each of his two seasons at the D-I level.

Discussion on OSU’s 2020 class starts and ends with the No. 1 player in the nation Cade Cunningham. Even Flavors, a grad transfer, wanted to talk with the incoming freshman about how they would fit together in Stillwater.

“You’ve got a guy in Ferron who, everywhere he’s been, every year has made shots at a pretty efficient level from 3-point range and his ability to accept that that’s his responsibility for us,” Boynton said. “Sometimes the challenge is guys get so caught up in player development and versatility that they don’t want to embrace the thing that they do best. I think that he’s somebody that’s willing to embrace that and talking to Cade about Cade’s ability to help him have success in his last year of college basketball is something that we certainly thought was very, very attractive to what we needed.”

If OSU’s roster holds as is, Boynton would likely have two scholarships to work with for a 2021 class: Cunningham’s and Flavors’. Boynton said class balance isn’t as important as it once was, especially if the NCAA passes a rule where all players get to transfer once without having to sit out, a rule the NCAA is looking into.

Yet still, Boynton said having a little wiggle room to continue to recruit his next class is helpful.

“It’s really hard to think about class balance in this climate, especially if this one-time transfer thing goes together,” Boynton said. “It won’t matter. It really won’t matter. Your roster can have 10 sophomores on it because the classes won’t matter because guys will just leave and go to another place and play the next year. Even as it stands, I’m not sure how much significance it is because of the grad transfer deal.

“But we still try to keep in mind in order to honestly recruit, there’s gotta be some scholarship available, right? If you’re gonna try to recruit three or four guys, it’s hard to do that if you’re full. You can probably go over one, but it’s hard to go over two or three, so yeah, that helps the big picture in terms of recruiting for 2021. But we don’t honestly have many conversations about class balance anymore.”