The NCAA men’s basketball season isn’t even over yet, and the offseason is already getting crazy.

Reports say Frank Martin is leaving Kansas State for South Carolina, numerous players are leaving early for the NBA — Royce White among them — and, as always, frustrated athletes are searching to find new homes.

Most notably this offseason, it appears as though Trent Lockett will leave Arizona State and Alex Oriakhi wants to leave Connecticut.

The bidding for the two players is sure to intensify over the next few weeks, and ISU men’s basketball fans should know — if they don’t already — why that will happen.

Fred Hoiberg.

What “the Mayor” did with the 2011-12 Cyclones may become a benchmark for coaches going forward on how to quickly rebuild a program.

With its first NCAA tournament berth since 2005, Iowa State proved that with the right mix of talent and personalities, putting together a roster full of transfers can work.

Hoiberg was criticized by a lot of people two years ago while recruiting the likes of White, Chris Allen and Chris Babb to come play for the Cyclones.

Surely, they said, mixing that many guys who played a big role on their former team — or in White’s case, figured to play a big role — wouldn’t work. Who would get the ball? Would they be unselfish? Who would be the leader?

By succeeding and (eventually) gelling as a team, the Cyclones may have inadvertently made their coach look like a genius.

Hoiberg has been quoted many times saying the strategy of bringing in several transfers at a time will not be what he uses the most going forward. He’s always said it was an effort to quickly rebuild a program that went 59-68 — that’s an average of just less than 15 wins a year — over the previous four years.

You think maybe a program like Nebraska or Texas Tech might be keen to a strategy that might get them 13 more wins than what the team has averaged?

We think so.

Granted, that requires recruits to want to go to a school — sorry, Nebrasketball fans, but that will take quite a bit more than firing Doc Sadler — but you get the point.

Guys like Lockett and Oriakhi are pieces that can put a bubble team over the edge and into NCAA tournament contention, or they can be a significant upgrade to a roster with depleted talent and in need of an anchor to build around.

What worked for Hoiberg — finding hard-working, unselfish players who each want to win more than anything — may not work specifically for others, but the idea very well could.

Bottom line, Hoiberg and Iowa State may have ignited a whole new era of college basketball free agency when it comes to courting several transfers during the offseason.

Is that good or bad for college basketball? Only time will tell.

But what we do know is it worked for Iowa State, and because it did, other struggling programs are likely to do whatever they can to get back to the postseason.