Over The Scholarship Limit, Oregon State Somehow In The Running For Michigan’s Cole Bajema

Michigan forward Cole Bajema is leaving the Wolverines program.

The story is nothing special, considering there are currently over 750 transfers in college basketball this off-season alone. A 6’ 7”, 180-pound forward, Bajema was a four-star recruit coming out of high school and likely expected to find a larger role in Michigan’s rotation last season. After a letdown freshman campaign, where he saw action in only 10 games, his decision to depart Ann Arbor is a fathomable one.

That’s not the story here.

The story here is Oregon State basketball’s roster situation, as the Beavers already boast 14 players under scholarship (one over the NCAA Division I limit) heading into next season. The Beavers recently were listed in the final five schools by Seton Hall transfer Anthony Nelson and now have entered the sweepstakes for Bajema as well. None of this makes any sense by simple mathematics standards. None of it. When you already have too much of something, why worry about adding more? We’ve tried time and time again here at Building The Dam to decipher it. We’ve gotten no closer to a legitimate answer.

In some ways, you could understand the program getting into this problem in one capacity or another, as head coach Wayne Tinkle and his staff dished out a rare assortment of offers to junior college transfers and ended up landing a few of them between former Oklahoma State forward Maurice Calloo and one-time Eastern Michigan guard Tariq Silver. That might’ve been a bit unexpected, considering the Beavers rare success on that front. But even if that was their issue, the recent transfer of guard Sean Miller-Moore should’ve pushed Oregon State closer to a solution for this roster overload, not back into the running for more players.

It simply answers none of the questions about what the heck really is going on with this program.

So, yes, Oregon State is somehow in the running for Michigan transfer Cole Bajema, a native of Lynden, Washington, who according to 247Sports, has also been contacted by “Gonzaga, Washington, Washington State, (OSU), BYU, Pepperdine and more”. But how? Well, that’s a question for another day, especially if Bajema or Nelson decided that Corvallis might be the place they want to make their future home.