After three years of becoming one of the best UNM Lobo basketball players ever, former Mountain West Player of the Year Donovan Dent decided to go west last season to play for the UCLA Bruins.
Friday, amid a chaotic college athletics landscape in which a court ruling in California deemed him eligible to play this season, Dent has now decided to "Geaux" east and play for the LSU Tigers.
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Dent, who currently lives in Albuquerque with his fiancée, a UNM graduate and current UNM Medical School student, started the summer off by announcing to the Journal his retirement from playing basketball to focus on coaching — "I'm done with pro basketball," Dent said in an interview with the Journal. "… I want to start working in individual training, group sessions, things like that and I want to get started on that out here (in Albuquerque) — young kids, older kids, just help them with their game and I wanted to start it here because Albuquerque gave me so much."
The 6-foot-2 guard from California is currently deemed eligible to play this season due to a court case in California in which he, and dozens of other players from the high school graduating class of 2022 who already played four full seasons of college basketball, have been granted an injunction allowing them to play this season.
The NCAA earlier this summer announced a new "five-for-five" eligibility rule that allows all players starting with the 2023 class to have five years to play as many as five seasons — upping the previous limit of four seasons of playing eligibility over a five-year span. Numerous legal challenges to that rule essentially arguing that since the rule was just enacted, it should apply to all student athletes still in that five-year window.
Despite several losses in court already, the NCAA has said it will fight the California court ruling and several others around the country that have thrown a monkey wrench into late summer roster management for so many programs in all sports, but especially football and men's basketball.
As of Friday afternoon, Dent is considered eligible to play and new LSU coach Will Wade seems to have landed the services of the point guard who led UNM to a Mountain West championship in 2025 when he averaged 20.4 points and 6.4 assists.
Last season at UCLA, Dent averaged 13.3 points and 7.6 assists.
While the payoff for the former Lobo to transfer to UCLA for this past season was in the $3 million range — far more than he could have received to stay with the UNM Lobos — the Journal is confident from talking with multiple sources familiar with his deal with LSU that his move to go play in the SEC this year for LSU is significantly more than even that UCLA deal.
A text message to Dent on Friday evening was not returned for comment.
Geoff Grammer is the Sports Editor of the Journal and covers UNM Lobos basketball, among other things. Reach him at ggrammer@abqjournal.com or follow him on Twitter (X) @GeoffGrammer.
