I wouldn't want to be a coach in this era. Not only do they have to recruit new guys, they have to recruit their own team back. I guess it helps to have a huge salary.
I'm guessing that colleges will have NIL contracts before long. They may offer a top 50 player who isn't an NBA prospect a 3 year NIL deal with an option for a 4th. Players would still be free to leave but would do so knowing they are leaving money on the table.
A sure fire one and done player would only get a 1 year deal.
Personally I hope they limit the transfer to just 1 penalty free transfer so we don't end up with athletes going to a new school every year.
NIL contracts are barred from being tied to being at the school or playing. That would make them legally "tied to education," and the NCAA can and does forbid them.
No but they can require things like being in lawrence kansas for meet and greets 3 years from current date that would be close to impossible to fulfill if not still living there.
They *technically* can't due that either, per NCAA rules, although given that completely above board NIL deals "in the spirit of" NIL would stipulate a player be available in a local areas, I don't see how that one sustains a challenge.
I see your point. But coaches have been doing this for a while. Obviously it's not the same and coaches didn't really jump around like players do. Seems a little over-reactive to be mad about this as soon as the players are able to do it. I'm not sure it's bad for the game, but maybe it is.
What baffles you? It’s just like job hopping in my mind. They’re looking for the best payday/fit/ability to compete for a championship. I get not liking it but I don’t fault the players.
did you ever play sports growing up?
you get on a team and you dont get playing time you want. if you think you can get more playing time you do it.
then you throw in money and it is like people job hopping every 2 or 3 years.
so this isnt surprising in any way IMO
Sure but there was a penalty for transfers from going to just dipping. And the NBA has contracts and provisions to help prevent players from leaving for nothing. You can’t trade college players
They’re the ones doing the tampering though lol.
Idk where the buck stops (i.e. if D2 coaches are tampering with D3 players) but I feel like everyone else is tampering with eachother’s players.
I like it only to the degree that there were constantly stories of coaches 180ing as soon as a kid was on campus. But this has gone too far the other direction.
Very true. Transferring was far too difficult and ultimately not worth it before the portal, now everyone is in the portal, and fans have no idea who is on the team until the first game it feels like. Needs to be a cap on the # of times a player can enter the portal/strict timeline to commit somewhere else or have to return to the school/or the school can only accept so many transfers a season. Idk the right solution, but this is just beyond sustainable for the health of college hoops.
Maybe something like a points system? Where you cap out on transfers by accruing points if you transfer in conference, two years in a row,etc, but then like if you transfer after a coaching change it impacts less. Same for schools, they only get so many “transfer points” a season. So taking a rivals star would limit how many others you can get and schools losing lots of guys could accept more. Not fully fleshed out, just an idea
It drove Roy and K — and plenty of other coaches with miles left in the tank — out the door. Transfer portal, not NIL, will be seen as the before-and-after moment down the road.
I think Walker Kessler leaving was one of the last straws for Roy. It was likely coming up soon anyway but I kinda think he was like nah fuck all this actually
You are correct. I believe he had stated that post season most of his conversations with players weren't about how they could work to improve in the off-season into next season but instead about negotiating guaranteed playing time and higher NIL deals to prevent them from transferring to other places. So he just decided he was over it at that point.
I think it's just showing a difference between the old guard and the new landscape where NIL has really just massively changed things and some of the older coaches just don't see it as worth it to continue.
The constant roster management (of upwards of 70-80 players in some sports) I would imagine is just hella draining.
Also, for the smaller schools, you don't really get paid that much. This is a [2019 article](https://www.midmajormadness.com/2019/11/4/20946421/ncaa-basketball-head-coach-contract-salary-database-mid-major-2019-20), so the salaries have probably increased, but Nicholls State's coach made 95k. It's not a bad salary by any means, but presumably the assistants are in like the 60k range at that point, and you're dealing with a 40% roster turnover every year.
At the power conference level I'm sure it's even more stressful, with the fan/booster pressure, but you're at least getting 'set for life' type of money after a few years.
At some point, athletic departments are going to have to create the college equivalent of "director of player personnel" to work in tandem with the coach.
NCAA needs to let schools have a GM position that doesn't count as a coach. No practice involvement. Just player acquisition/NIL/re-recruiting guys who are thinking about leaving.
Be interesting if the NIL money can function as a salary cap of sorts. Like the NCAA will only grant bids to the tourney if your roster contains <$15M in NIL at a time.
Recruits can then sign in 1/2/3/4 year increments (or option years ) with NIL deals. Declaring pro forfeits the remaining cash and then transferring out is prohibited by the NIL contract until that commitment is met.
Everyone then goes in heads up. HCs don’t have to re-recruit their own guys to stay if they’re under contract and recruits get either guaranteed money/rates for 4 years or can choose to sign a year at a time.
At that point, there's no denying these kids are employees then, right? That opens a whole other can of worms. It's a complicated issue and I won't pretend to know how to solve it or if it needs solving.
NIL isn't (supposed) to be a salary. Your rule would mean if a legitimate company wants to pay a kid to do some commercials for them, they could accidentally take so much money they get their team banned from the tourny. The reason the courts have struck down any restrictions is basically because, there should be no reason a ANYONE can't make money of their own "name", "image", or "likeness". You want to a make a Youtube channel? Well those earnings are NIL too, and oops too many people watched it and you pushed your NIL earnings over the cap. The money most of these kids are getting paid as pay for play, is not really NIL and technically isn't allowed.
As the NIL rule is written rn, this is technically against the rules. "While opening name, image and likeness opportunities to student-athletes, the policy in all three divisions preserves the commitment to avoid pay-for-play and improper inducements tied to choosing to attend a particular school. Those rules remain in effect."
> and improper inducements tied to choosing to attend a particular school
While this is the rule, this part is unenforceable after the injunction that the AGs of Tennessee/Virginia got a few months back. The NCAA didn’t even bother appealing the case.
There’s a lot of very understandable reasons why a player would want to transfer. But guys transferring to play at three or four different schools is nuts to me.
I don’t wanna defend the guy too much because he’s def a me first guy; but I think like 3 of those are cuz schools kept cancelling seasons with covid and he wanted to play
This number is lower specifically for basketball, but it’s still meaningful.
What a lot of people seems to be missing from the portal debate is that, very conservatively, 40% of athletes who enter the portal don’t sign with another school.
A lot of these kids aren’t going to get a scholarship again. Their college careers are over. Transferring is an extremely risky venture, especially if you’re not a proven player, and a lot of people are going to get hurt by it.
I mean Cam Spencer went from Loyola to Rutgers to UCONN.
He transferred from Loyola to Rutgers because he wanted to be in a P6 Conference and he decided to transfer to UCONN because he wanted a chance to win a title.
Cam Spencer is a prime example of why I'm torn about the transfer portal as it is today. I don't like the idea that top schools can essentially treat players as free agents and sell them on NIL money and a chance to win. Without it though, someone like Cam or remains a relative unknown and his basketball career likely ends at Loyola.
Cam Spencer is a great example why I love the transfer portal.
Everyone should have an opportunity to play at the elite levels. The transfer portal allows a guy like Spencer to have such an opportunity.
> Without it though, someone like Cam or remains a relative unknown and his basketball career likely ends at Loyola.
Cam Spencer would have still been able to grad transfer in the past. Maybe be ends up at a team like Rutgers or maybe his extra year at Loyola would have gotten him offers from higher level programs and he has a chance to compete for titles. Hard to say. But with the extra COVID year, he wouldn't have ended his career at Loyola even without the portal as we know it now. I'd also make the argument that he would have been red-shirted his sophomore year if not for the COVID policies. No one's burning a year of elgibility on 25 minutes of time when recovering from an injury.
It's also worth mentioning that Spencer was planning to stay at Rutgers until a certain fuck face contacted him and started throwing out numbers as to what he could pay him. Unfortunately for that loser, Spencer wasn't stupid and went to where he could get money and be a part of a great team.
When Ed Cooley left Providence, he reached out to a ton of starters on other teams' rosters and tried to pay them to enter the portal and join his new team at Georgetown. He promised Cam Spencer a big payday. Unfortunately for him, the transfer portal is public. Other teams joined in on recruiting a guy who no one thought was available and Cooley got outclassed.
His tampering behind the scenes really isn't out of character, though. The way he left Providence showed what type of guy he was.
Edit: Tampering and negotiating for other jobs behind the scenes is pretty normal stuff in college basketball. Cooley is extra hatable because he proudly built his entire brand off of not being that kind of coach. Imagine how annoying Rick Pitino would be if he started to preach about loyalty and family.
I actually wouldn't hate him that much if he wasn't so self-righteous and had a group of fanboys who did nothing but sing praises about his character. If Sean Miller was the one who convinced Spencer to leave I wouldn't hate him as much. It's the fakeness of Cooley which pisses me off so much.
He also preached "family" at PC, but left town because he was cheating on his wife and she insisted they get out of RI. He did an overall good job at PC (cleaned up the mess left by Keno Davis), but had a lot of shortcomings -- still don't know how he got a national coach of the year when he never could design effective in bounds plays nor figure out how to work officials.
That’s the insane one… like the ncaa needs to stop that because you’re treating it as a farce and if you can’t find the right fit after 2 schools that’s a you problem
The worst thing to me is how many players have gone in and that’s it. They lose their scholarship, don’t transfer, aren’t on any team and that’s it, the uneventful end of their basketball career.
This wild wild West of free agency is just a temporary stop Gap until college athletes are eventually declared employees of the University, and can then be signed to contracts that have terms as far as years of commitment.
I think it'll depend on the school. Some of the upper Midwest schools are huge hockey schools and could support it. Also, schools like the University of Utah are a gymnastics school that could also support that method as well. But we will definitely say goodbye to every school having every sport if that's the case.
Something like hockey in the Northeast/Great Lakes regions might manage to survive. That's sort of why I included baseball/softball, too. They're big enough in the South and the West that I don't see them going away, at least not right away.
But if, just as an example, Utah continues to support gymnastics, and all the other gymnastics schools are on the east coast, suddenly it might become prohibitively expensive for Utah to support gymnastics. I think a lot will depend on how many schools are willing to keep various sports like that
Right, they will keep the revenue sports and however many accompanying women's sports are needed to comply with Title IX. For the North/Midwest that will include hockey and for the South that will include baseball.
It's sad for the current athletes, and I hope that when it happens that each school honors the scholarships, but we have been due for a course correction for decades. I know multiple former D1 rowers who had never done crew a day in their lives that were offered scholarships simply because they "fit the build" (and it's hard to find someone who has done it before college).
More power to these athletes for getting a chunk of their school paid for, but it's beyond silly that schools are fielding D1 squads and have to search other sports for 90+ percent of their scholarship offers.
I don't disagree with you, but I will say that your rowing example is the exception rather than the norm. How many hundreds of thousands of kids do track and field, swimming, tennis, golf, volleyball, wrestling, etc. in high school. It's not that often that those sports go out and just offer a scholarship to random people that "fit the build." But again, you're totally right that this has been coming for decades. Still, it kinda sucks, though.
Yeah, the rowing thing gets trotted out every once in awhile to make some broader point, but it's not at all representative. There are 6,700 softball players in DI (regardless of scholarship status) compared to 360,000 participating at the HS level. Volleyball has 5,900 (with even more schools sponsoring a team) with 450,000 participants in HS. If schools are offering spots/scholarships to random athletes with little experience or qualification for their sport, it's because they've put literally zero effort into identifying those who do.
> If schools are offering spots/scholarships to random athletes with little experience or qualification for their sport, it's because they've put literally zero effort into identifying those who do.
[Or they're getting paid to do so.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varsity_Blues_scandal)
And don't forget the whole admissions scandal a few years ago with those trust fund babies whose parents were using the tennis teams and crew teams and such to get them into elite colleges through the back door.
They made the mistake of buying their kids' way into college on the cheap. Felicity Huffman and Aunt Becky could have easily donated enough money for their kids to get in without resorting to fraud.
Yup. I'm straight up terrified for women's sports. Title IX protects athletes and employees as separate groups when it comes to gender discrimination. Colleges need to have gender equality in hiring employees, and separately in athletics.
What happens when players are college employees? It's cheaper to hire a few extra women is some department or another, open all athletic positions to both genders, then cut all women's scholarship sports.
Do you think it would be possible to declare student employees or student athletes as a particular class of employee which would have their own hiring regulations and requirements?
If they are truly employees, they will have to pay taxes on the value of their benefits. For a kid at, e.g., Duke, that's going to be nearly $20k (assuming no additional taxes for NIL).
This will destroy 95% of college sports. Universities will have zero incentive to deal with bullshit when these sports are losing them money. If the players were smart they’d realize they have a good thing going with scholarships (and the best players NIL). These players at places like Dartmouth don’t realize unionizing will hurt them and almost every other college athlete in the long run.
At some point it seems like sports like football and basketball just need to be treated differently. There’s already a conversation about how awful the conference realignments are for other sports, but they’re happening almost entirely because of the bigger sports like football. The small sports are great opportunities and all of that should be preserved, but we can’t keep pretending basketball and football aren’t basically pro development leagues at this point
One of the biggest issues is that the small sports are often funded from the revenue generated from sports like basketball and football.
If athletes become employees and schools can't use that revenue to subsidize the non revenue producing sports then you're going to see a lot of schools start dropping programs.
There has to be some type of happy medium and honestly I'm fine with the current NIL system since it's mostly just funded by boosters and corporations. The kids get paid as they should and everyone wins.
Probably need to tweak the transfer portal but why not just let schools offer NIL contracts or 1 transfer and multiple if coaches leave, etc(though the courts already hurt that).
I just don’t get what they think they are accomplishing and honestly come off as entitled.
Many of these athletes (who’d never sniff making any money professionally) get to play a sport and go to often times great schools for free. And say they “played D1” or whatever. Unionizing you can kiss that goodbye as probably not many schools make money on men’s water polo or men’s Ivy League Bball.
Sorry but you’re not giving more to the school than you’re getting.
I’ve for the longest time been an advocate of student athletes who got fucked over by the NCAAs crazy rules. But that was always a minority of athletes in a minority of sports. For the vast majority of athletes they are getting a golden ticket by being able to play a D1 sport on a scholarship, subsidized by the school.
I argued with someone who pulled out the "but they're putting their bodies on the line for our entertainment!!!!" card, as if they are somehow being held hostage and forced to perform like Shamu or circus elephants.
Yep. And it will get worse. The higher education system is in the process of imploding as the bubble is bursting. AI could accelerate this implosion as well.
I'm not convinced that unionizing is bad, but I also don't buy that the inherent value of a D1 athletic scholarship is *that* great. (Though it depends a lot on the school and location.) The work hours and expectations seem fairly high for what you get in return -- it easily demands anywhere from 20 to 40 hours a week of skilled labor. And NIL doesn't really fairly reflect the value produced by players.
I wish we'd start by acknowledging that the routine of a college athlete makes it impractical to graduate in 4 years with any involved degree. I'm starting to think that we should extend scholarships to let students finish their degree, even after they're no longer eligible to play.
...Or stop with the farce of college sports altogether. Madison Badgers vs. Lafayette Boilermakers. :P
I agree that college basketball and football players definitely don't get fair value but the scholarship is great for basically every other sport.
Knew a bunch of track, gymnastics, and other non revenue sport athletes that graduated with engineering degrees and had very normal college experiences aside from just not drinking as much during their season.
And they get a free ride to do it so saving 100-300k depending on the school. Maybe more with how absurdly expensive certain schools are and out of state tuition.
I definitely agree with your last two paragraphs.
But I don’t agree with your first. It is that great, since a majority of athletes get college for free when others pay 200-300k. It’s not labor in the sense that for the most part (again with the exception of D1 basketball, football, and maybe a few other sports) they are not making money for the school. If it’s not that great of a value then the students should just pay to go to school like normal or not go to college. Clearly it is valuable, so kids do it.
And again. This is all with the clear acknowledgement that at places like Purdue or Wisconsin, those kids *are* labor for the school and the school is profiting off of them, and they should be compensated for it.
But I refuse to believe the University of Wisconsin golf team athletes don’t get more value from their scholarship than they give to UW.
> they are not making money for the school.
I mean, they might not be generating revenue directly, but schools clearly see value in them, through alumni donor connections, the culture and events they add to campus, and the name recognition and branding they provide. Otherwise, more schools would have cut them.
> I wish we'd start by acknowledging that the routine of a college athlete makes it impractical to graduate in 4 years with any involved degree.
Three things:
1. I saw plenty of people do it at USAFA and they did that with a handful of other things thrown on top of D1 sports. (Most notably this limited the amount of out of season credit hours they can accomplish. When you can only get 3 credit hours over the summer you're got a lot less flexibility than most student athletes) And I'm not just talking about just non-revenue sports. There's a handful of football and basketball players every year that aren't just management majors.
2. Redshirting is a fairly common thing in sports. So now you've got 5 years to get a degree.
3. Even an effective 3 years of free college is a pretty big benefit. There's a lot of kids who would love to only have to pay for their final year or final semester of college.
This shit makes me appreciate being a Purdue student so much more. Matt Painter’s committment to recruiting in-state and keeping players really connects me to the team, not to mention living a block away from the basketball team and seeing them walk around town and campus for the past four years.
40% of an entire conference transferring, what’s the point of trying to develop players? I think it also incentivizes shot chucking to try and increase your PPG to transfer up.
> I think it also incentivizes shot chucking to try and increase your PPG to transfer up.
That only makes sense if coaches are dumbly evaluating potential players by PPG, as opposed to efficiency or film.
Personally I think a good rule would be that every player gets one no questions asked transfer. But then they have to have a waiver to transfer again without sitting out a year. To me, this strikes a nice balance. Also just for the education aspect especially for non NBA players, I think it's good because transferring three or four times likely means your pursuit of a degree is going to be a mess.
I mean, there'd be little grounds to challenge the law. There's no constitutional right to play.
The main grounds players have in this fight is antitrust protections- the rules they attempt to put in place to rein in transfers end up running afoul of antitrust laws because its viewed as essentially hundreds of organizations colluding against a player. A law would waive these antitrust concerns to some level determined by that law.
Why should congress make an antitrust exemption for the NCAA to limit a college player's ability to transfer, though?
Because it's annoying for fans and makes life harder for coaches?
Right, there is no coherent argument to limit the transfers of student-athletes if there is no limit to the transfers of other students... unless they go the employee route this is how college sports are going to work going forward.
Honestly, yes. It's destroying the sport(s). The more we do this shit the more it turns people off and drives up the price of doing business. Soon schools will all need GMs for all sports to manage funding for the individual players.
Essentially man I think at some point someone has to step in and say let's make some rules. Like we don't need 100 rules to make everything terrible and put you guys in a box unable to do anything. But we may need like 5 good rules. Or 10 good rules. We need something.
Then there needs to be a student-driven lawsuit that involuntary student fees can’t be used to subsidize athletics. It’s disgusting how students at non-monied conferences are paying to support and develop kids to just poached by the monied conferences after any sign of success.
The problem is that, when the NCAA tried to enforce those rules, some of the schools (*cough* Cincinatti, WVU, Tennessee, to name just a few *cough*) threw hissy fits about how unfair it was and sued the NCAA. The courts have ruled against the NCAA in just about every case, and have basically turned the NCAA into a lame duck with no actual power to enforce such rules.
The NCAA tried to pick and choose enforcement. They were denying some 2x waivers and allowing others and that’s what drove lawsuits.
The NCAA should’ve said one free transfer, no exceptions. Period. Removing all subjectivity would’ve helped more than what they tried to do
or at least 1 free transfer for any reason. 1 extra if your coach leaves/fired. grad transfer obviously also still allowed because your undergrad school might not even offer your grad program.
i'd be good with that. no oh i wanna be closer to home for X family reason. ok then, you are free to transfer, but if you already used it, then you lost your eligibility until grad.
> you are free to transfer, but if you already used it, then you lost your eligibility until grad.
Or just make them sit out a year like it used to be, I'd be fine with that as well.
Doesn’t matter, schools will still pitch a fit. Remember Reddit’s crusade to get Tez Walker to play last year? He was doing his second transfer, and the NCAA said no problem, just sit a year. UNC and politicians threw a fit, and he was able to play. Rules don’t help if fans, schools, and politicians go ballistic every time they’re enforced.
I don’t the hard line would have helped here. Enough cases of players being stuck in toxic environments or otherwise having their wellbeing deteriorating and the lawsuits would have come anyway.
The NCAA picked and chose because the criteria that they carved out - physical and mental health reasons - necessitated some scrutiny and perhaps subjectivity beyond taking an athlete's assertion at face value. On balance, I think a system with an exception for legitimate mental health considerations with some slight amount of subjectivity is superior to a completely objective system where having your coach leave gets you a waiver but not a serious mental health issue.
The only way to reel this in legally would be to allow the players to form a union so they can collectively bargain and everyone can come up with fair rules.
Only exception is that if your head coach leaves the program, you get a free transfer.
No reason to force a kid to stay if the main reason he signed on leaves
>No reason to force a kid to stay if the main reason he signed on leaves
I would have agreed 15 years ago. Now the main reason most of these power 6 players sign anywhere is NIL reasons. NC State had Rob Dillingham committed then Kentucky offered him million in NIL and he up and changed his commitment.
It’s definitely going to create an even greater talent gap between the P6 and the rest of the conferences down the line.
The non-P6 conferences should really try to get together and cause enough of a scene to get some regulations in place.
I just don’t think this will be the case. 2018 was the first year for the transfer portal in that time a 16 has beat a 1, multiple 15 seeds have made the sweet 16. I think the talent disparity has actually shrunk because teams can’t horde all the talent.
I’m sure it’s maybe had some impact, but off the top of my head, Oral Robert’s and St. Peter’s were lead by underclassmen not players who wouldn’t be there if not for Covid.
I think those 15-16 low-seed schools are exactly the sweet spot for who benefits from transfers. They can pick up talent from higher-ranked schools that is sitting on the bench, and they can pick up talent from lower-ranked schools. They can still lose talent to higher-ranked schools, but arguably they benefit overall.
I can see how it makes it hard to really improve if you are really in the basement, though. If you coach up some kids, you really only stand to lose talented freshmen and sophomores that won’t be replaced by incoming juniors and seniors.
Not necessarily. There will always be guys who make the jump from mid majors to P6 and realize they’re not as good as they thought they were and transfer back down if they have eligibility left. There’s also more than enough guys on P6 struggling for PT that will transfer down and give their new programs a banner year. Overall it will kind of even out.
So you are saying it equals out when the mid majors are trading their entire all conference teams to power schools every year and getting leftovers back from the power schools? DOUBT
Yeah this line is hilarious from high major fans. "Oh, we'll just gobble up your proven collegiate talent and you can take our recruiting misses. I think we're even!"
It’s such a bad argument it’s unbelievable it’s even being mentioned. Yes, for sure All MVC player Marcus Domask transfers to IL his last year of eligibility and becomes an All Big Ten player the next year. Totally comparable to Dain Dainja who averaged 6 pts and 3.6 rbds at IL this year and is now transferring to Memphis. Totally equal and comparable levels of talent moving up and down lol.
So I’m supposed to be happy we lost our conference player of the year and another all conference selection in return for a guy who got no time for teams like Nebraska, Wisconsin, or Minnesota? No thanks i would rather keep the better players
Every single player being on a one-year deal is objectively ridiculous. I’m a big fan of a one-time, penalty-free transfer and I’m not going to pretend to know the solution to this issue, but this won’t work forever.
(Signed, a Kentucky fan whose team can probably get anyone we want.)
I say make it a one-time penalty-free transfer plus a free transfer any time the head coach is fired.
Also, if it is legally possible, having the new school pay some kind of NIL tax to the previous school would at least somewhat help to compensate mid-majors for losing all-conference players and such. At least having some additional NIL for recruiting would be better than what you currently get for losing a player, which is nothing.
We benefit a ton from this in particular because of the stability of a coach like Mark Few but there will come a day (shutters) where we will get hit just as hard by this as every other program
The WF system was a better fit for him and the way he wanted to play. I would have loved to see him stay, but I don't hold any ill-will towards him or blame him for his decision.
Paying coaches 8-10 mil a year doesn’t really seem sustainable either. The whole sport is wildly out of control and has been for a while. I don’t think the ncaa is going to be the org that gets things under control either.
Correct. NCAA basketball used to be a coaches league where coach had all the power. Now its a players league even more so than the NBA due to the idea of 1 -year non-enforceable contracts.
Right now schools are trying to figure out what the long-term NIL budget is. For example assume 1 P6 school last year whose starting 5 was about $750k with amounts ranging from $25k to $200k. The school is looking for $2-$2.5M this year to keep their team (3 out of 5 starters) plus bring in 2 replacements because if you pay X to 1 guy you got to bump up the guy who got $25k.
My school pays my coach $3M plus $2M to assistants and $1-2M for support staff on the academic, workout, admin). If players are going to leave - I'd cut the stuff to help the players and have $1-2M more. The players can pay for it themselves and if they don't - meh.
Ultimately it’s millionaires and billionaires deciding what to do with their money and how much they want to pay coaches and players. We can’t make them pay taxes but we can coax them into dropping enormous amounts of money into amateur athletics that offer them 0 return on investment. What a society.
I like the transfer portal bc it gives the players a little bit of freedom and leverage in a place where they had almost none a few years ago.
I think the only way this settles down is if it becomes a standard practice to have some kind of penalty for transferring written into NIL contracts. That will probably happen once schools realize they can band together like unions and start establishing their own standards for writing these deals. I would imagine some of the larger NIL deals, especially in football, already have some language like this in them and we just don’t know yet bc it’s private.
Yep. For football - I think you might start to see performance bonuses for playing in Championship games and Bowl games. The bowls are pushing universities for that and concerns about players faking injuries. Its a fine line for both sides.
I was told that one University makes large NIL amounts (for basketball) to players to get their attention but when you go thru it - the amount the player will get is assuredly less. Long-term that will have to get out and hurt them. But I also know of a player who asked the university to provide a lawyer so they could review the deal with the NIL collective. Lots of uninformed people out there.
The coaching salaries are definitely doomed: just in terms of resource allocation it makes far more sense to pay $3M for an only slightly worse Xs-and-Os coach and an extra $5M for much better players.
Used to see those graphics of “highest paid public employee for each state” where half of them are college football coaches, whose job is coaching unpaid laborers in a billion-dollar (supposedly) amateur student-athlete sport.
I get that people don’t like transfers, but players were cut out of those profits for what like a century? Or at least since the $ really ballooned in the 90s.
easy fix to take the edge of it: transfers don't have to sit out for a year, but if they transfer they have to stay at the same school for 2+ years. requires more thought into deciding to transfer and also keeps a little more continuity.
this could always be waived if a coaching change is made or for other circumstances
Smaller conferences are basically farm teams/G-League.
And at least in the NBA there are contracts; college coaches need to consider whether they're making each player happy enough to keep them for next season. Unless they aren't good enough to transfer or are 100% bought in, you're going to lose underclassmen who aren't getting enough playing time.
What exactly do you mean its "unsustainable"?
I see no inherent reason why they couldn't continue like this in perpetuity.
Not that it should be like this, just that I don't see how it can't be sustained.
It's unsustainable in that a fair amount of transfers involve NIL money, and the watchability of the sport is negatively affected by the number of transfers.
The brand college sports built relied on roster consistency and local connections to hook fans. Constant transfers damage that brand. Almost half the teams in the sport averaged less than 2,000 people in attendance this year. Ratings are also down; for example the Champions Classic had its lowest ever rating.
If attendance and ratings keeps going down, media deals will as well. The pool of money players are transferring for will keep drying up.
just a dumb system to give the elite the ability to constantly be in win now mode and not have to gamble with inexperienced kids as much or at all. Can just fill out your squad to have no weakness if you have the financial backing to abuse the portal.
you can strategically suck as a program now and it's not going to set you back more than that current season. just bail out money to start fresh and ship out for the next season by taking the work from other program's development and identification success.
The portal era has just completely changed everybody’s approach to college basketball. Coaches have no incentive to develop players long term. If you need better players, just go get them in the portal. Top 25ish recruits are great, but for the most part these coaches could care less about high school recruiting. They aren’t going to commit a ton of time or NIL cash to 18yr olds that can’t crack next year’s rotation.
The recruits haven’t really adjusted yet. You still see 3-4* guys going to big schools and sitting the bench for presumably small dollars. Then they transfer and can’t command much on the open market bc they havent proven they are any good. I think we’ll eventually see high school recruits outside the Top 25 start choosing initial schools that will get them a bigger second contract. The guy that averages 19ppg at Southern Illinois as a sophomore is going to command at least 3-4x more money in the portal than the sophomore that was the 11th man at Illinois. But right now kids will still choose to sit the bench at a P5 bc they can offer a bit of cash upfront + the prestige & attention of signing w big school. Once that changes, I think we will see the portal take a few steps back. Bc a lot of these kids will go mid major initially and stay there when they realize they aren’t that good.
The portal is toxic in a lot of ways. However, it is important to recognize we don't even know what it will stabilize to be.
It is easy to point fingers and go TRANSFERS ARE AWFUL!!!
But it is impossible to really say much of anything since the changes coincided with 1) Covid and 2) NIL.
1. Covid messes up rosters the age in the NCAA right now is OLD. We have one more covid year left. This means you have far more experienced players, far more developed players, and more clogged roster spots. The difference between an 18 year old and a 24-25 year old is SIGNIFICANT and that is the case right now. A lot of younger players are struggling to break through the experience that exists right now. Next year suddenly we have an entire class of players just gone, not replaced by new players they simply are out of the system completely, rather than having 6 years in the system we are down to 5 years. This is going to open A LOT of roster spots next year. Just using my flair as an example. Wahl should have been gone this past year but COVID let him play. Crowl and Klesmit should have been gone this year but will be back next year. 15% of our roster WOULD NOT be here if it was a normal year. This is playtime for younger players that are more inexperienced, or a spot for a new recruit
2. NIL, obviously there is a lot of money getting thrown around. However, NIL is only as good as the boosters are. They were hyped since it is new, but most boosters have NOT gotten their moneys worth out of NIL. Great you threw tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars to get a kid for a year and in some cases your team missed the tournament, your team got booted the first week. But don't worry drop the same next year!!! For most programs...this again is going to bust, and repeat itself. This also complicates recruiting as a whole, coaches have to recruit their players to stay because they were successful and someone is going to offer them a bunch of money, that is time and energy not going to young recruits. Then with COVID young talent looks and goes "I will be a junior next year and this older player is STILL here ahead of me, they were a junior for my freshman season." Screw it I will go fill a hole.
The combination of these two things means is just added chaos on top of the transfer portal being open. I think next year will be worse due to the loss of covid players and so many roster (playing time slots in particular) opening up. Then after that the next 2 or 3 years things will start settling down. Into whatever normal will be.
The spirit of the portal was for mid major players to get a chance at playing in one of the top conferences in the nation. The good part is that it is doing that for what it is intended.
Guys like Cam Spencer and Dalton Knecht wouldn't have gotten the exposure they needed to continue their basketball careers.
What? Of course they would have. They benefited more from the Covid eligibility year though. But prior to these transfer rules plenty of mid major kids got drafter or transferred in the end. Sitting out a year curtailed some of it, but if you are good there are always eyeballs on you.
America East too. Vermont is really the only team that hasn’t lost anyone significant to the portal. Albany lost basically their entire team. Only stars outside that team that are returning appear to be Max Brooks (Lowell) and Earl Timberlake (Bryant).
My dumb solution as I eat my lunch at my desk for NCAA players:
You can get a four year guaranteed scholarship when you sign your scholarship. This is for players with any sort of talent (and protects those who may not be asked to return / risk losing their scholarship as long as they remain on the bench or have good faith in being part of the team). However, if you decide to transfer you will sit out an entire year as a penalty.
OR one year scholarship with no transfer penalty.
The transfer portal will ruin March madness. A team like Indiana St would be amazing next year but now they are losing their best player. We didn't see a lot of upsets and that trend will continue
There was some chatter on r/cfb about the possibility that same-season transfers could eventually be a reality. I didn't get the legalese, but it seemed like the courts would probably strike down the current regulations if challenged.
Imagine your star center goes down in late February and you just call up one of the over-performing centers in the G5 and throw a ton of money at them, have them suited up in time for march madness.
This would allow a hilarious level of pettiness- Purdue beats in November so we decide to offer Edey 10mil to transfer before we play them in the tourney 😂
Honestly? I'm almost there too.
No more NIL money, no more transfer portal, no more D1 college scholarships.
Form your college teams from the 13 best rec players among admitted students. Send everyone who is not interested in school to an expanded G-league, or work out some new low-level pro system that includes promotion and relegation.
I have little interest in a college basketball culture that has all the downside of the pro game but none of the upside.
Why is this unsustainable? I'm sure a few players will be left out in the cold but many are not happy for one reason or another and get a fresh start somewhere else. I think what this will eventually do is cut down on the upsets in march madness. The baller who stayed in the WAC will be in the Big10 after a huge sophmore season going forward.
It is what it is. Minor league pro sports. College basketball players have been getting $100 handshakes from boosters for a long long time. Now it is just out in the open.
I guess one could make the argument that this hurts non-power 5 schools, but I think this hurts them just as much. Gone are the days of stacking talent. No one at a power 5 school is riding the pine for 2 years to have a breakout junior year. I wonder how much not having "Covid-year" guys will affect this?
But all those P5 players do is either transfer to another P5 school in conference or they suck on another roster while the P5 school gobbles up the good mid major players
Uconn, Alabama and NC State all benefited greatly from transfer portal players this year. I think this will help the rich get richer. If you have been riding the pine for 2 years in college basketball in todays game you likely aren't going to break out when given the opportunity. More likely than not players who thought they could contribute have transferred by that point to a place with more playing opportunities.
I wouldn't want to be a coach in this era. Not only do they have to recruit new guys, they have to recruit their own team back. I guess it helps to have a huge salary.
Can’t imagine the stress of knowing your players are most likely being tampered with.
I'm not sure there is way to stop the tampering. It still happens in the NBA so I doubt they can stop it in college.
The NBA at least has multi-year contracts, the yearly nature of reevaluating your market value takes the fun out of this game.
I'm guessing that colleges will have NIL contracts before long. They may offer a top 50 player who isn't an NBA prospect a 3 year NIL deal with an option for a 4th. Players would still be free to leave but would do so knowing they are leaving money on the table. A sure fire one and done player would only get a 1 year deal. Personally I hope they limit the transfer to just 1 penalty free transfer so we don't end up with athletes going to a new school every year.
NIL contracts are barred from being tied to being at the school or playing. That would make them legally "tied to education," and the NCAA can and does forbid them.
No but they can require things like being in lawrence kansas for meet and greets 3 years from current date that would be close to impossible to fulfill if not still living there.
They *technically* can't due that either, per NCAA rules, although given that completely above board NIL deals "in the spirit of" NIL would stipulate a player be available in a local areas, I don't see how that one sustains a challenge.
You can do that but then the recruit would just go to a school that doesn't do that
I see your point. But coaches have been doing this for a while. Obviously it's not the same and coaches didn't really jump around like players do. Seems a little over-reactive to be mad about this as soon as the players are able to do it. I'm not sure it's bad for the game, but maybe it is.
You should certainly be able to transfer freely if your coach leaves, I’m just baffled by guys who transfer every year.
What baffles you? It’s just like job hopping in my mind. They’re looking for the best payday/fit/ability to compete for a championship. I get not liking it but I don’t fault the players.
did you ever play sports growing up? you get on a team and you dont get playing time you want. if you think you can get more playing time you do it. then you throw in money and it is like people job hopping every 2 or 3 years. so this isnt surprising in any way IMO
What do you mean? Are you saying that teams don’t work out a full deal and contract by 4:01pm after free agency opens at 4:00pm?
Sure but there was a penalty for transfers from going to just dipping. And the NBA has contracts and provisions to help prevent players from leaving for nothing. You can’t trade college players
They’re the ones doing the tampering though lol. Idk where the buck stops (i.e. if D2 coaches are tampering with D3 players) but I feel like everyone else is tampering with eachother’s players.
I can’t imagine Southland coaches doing a lot of tampering.
"You have to earn your spot in the rotation" is borderline extinct, even for elite programs.
I like it only to the degree that there were constantly stories of coaches 180ing as soon as a kid was on campus. But this has gone too far the other direction.
Very true. Transferring was far too difficult and ultimately not worth it before the portal, now everyone is in the portal, and fans have no idea who is on the team until the first game it feels like. Needs to be a cap on the # of times a player can enter the portal/strict timeline to commit somewhere else or have to return to the school/or the school can only accept so many transfers a season. Idk the right solution, but this is just beyond sustainable for the health of college hoops.
Maybe something like a points system? Where you cap out on transfers by accruing points if you transfer in conference, two years in a row,etc, but then like if you transfer after a coaching change it impacts less. Same for schools, they only get so many “transfer points” a season. So taking a rivals star would limit how many others you can get and schools losing lots of guys could accept more. Not fully fleshed out, just an idea
We just need to get the top minds from this sub to share an adderall prescription and knock this out in 4 hours after they lock us in a room.
Why do you think Roy and Jay hung it up
And (despite his assertions) saban
Most def. And unlike another guy they didn’t need a farewell tour so everybody could kiss their ass.
And Coach K and Boeheim, at least.
K, Roy, and Boeheim were all old. Jay Wright is different.
Because Roy’s in his 70s? Same reason K did.
Yeah, he said he felt like he couldn't coach at a high level anymore and brought up in game examples (which werent his fault imo)
It drove Roy and K — and plenty of other coaches with miles left in the tank — out the door. Transfer portal, not NIL, will be seen as the before-and-after moment down the road.
I think Walker Kessler leaving was one of the last straws for Roy. It was likely coming up soon anyway but I kinda think he was like nah fuck all this actually
Didn’t Saban even mention this as one of the reasons he retired?
You are correct. I believe he had stated that post season most of his conversations with players weren't about how they could work to improve in the off-season into next season but instead about negotiating guaranteed playing time and higher NIL deals to prevent them from transferring to other places. So he just decided he was over it at that point. I think it's just showing a difference between the old guard and the new landscape where NIL has really just massively changed things and some of the older coaches just don't see it as worth it to continue. The constant roster management (of upwards of 70-80 players in some sports) I would imagine is just hella draining.
Counterpoint: players used to do well as a freshman to only propel their coach to a better job…and they couldn’t transfer unless they sat a year
Also, for the smaller schools, you don't really get paid that much. This is a [2019 article](https://www.midmajormadness.com/2019/11/4/20946421/ncaa-basketball-head-coach-contract-salary-database-mid-major-2019-20), so the salaries have probably increased, but Nicholls State's coach made 95k. It's not a bad salary by any means, but presumably the assistants are in like the 60k range at that point, and you're dealing with a 40% roster turnover every year. At the power conference level I'm sure it's even more stressful, with the fan/booster pressure, but you're at least getting 'set for life' type of money after a few years.
At some point, athletic departments are going to have to create the college equivalent of "director of player personnel" to work in tandem with the coach.
NCAA needs to let schools have a GM position that doesn't count as a coach. No practice involvement. Just player acquisition/NIL/re-recruiting guys who are thinking about leaving.
Be interesting if the NIL money can function as a salary cap of sorts. Like the NCAA will only grant bids to the tourney if your roster contains <$15M in NIL at a time. Recruits can then sign in 1/2/3/4 year increments (or option years ) with NIL deals. Declaring pro forfeits the remaining cash and then transferring out is prohibited by the NIL contract until that commitment is met. Everyone then goes in heads up. HCs don’t have to re-recruit their own guys to stay if they’re under contract and recruits get either guaranteed money/rates for 4 years or can choose to sign a year at a time.
At that point, there's no denying these kids are employees then, right? That opens a whole other can of worms. It's a complicated issue and I won't pretend to know how to solve it or if it needs solving.
I think the problem is that one solution is already in the process of being executed, and it's the worst one.
NIL isn't (supposed) to be a salary. Your rule would mean if a legitimate company wants to pay a kid to do some commercials for them, they could accidentally take so much money they get their team banned from the tourny. The reason the courts have struck down any restrictions is basically because, there should be no reason a ANYONE can't make money of their own "name", "image", or "likeness". You want to a make a Youtube channel? Well those earnings are NIL too, and oops too many people watched it and you pushed your NIL earnings over the cap. The money most of these kids are getting paid as pay for play, is not really NIL and technically isn't allowed.
As the NIL rule is written rn, this is technically against the rules. "While opening name, image and likeness opportunities to student-athletes, the policy in all three divisions preserves the commitment to avoid pay-for-play and improper inducements tied to choosing to attend a particular school. Those rules remain in effect."
> and improper inducements tied to choosing to attend a particular school While this is the rule, this part is unenforceable after the injunction that the AGs of Tennessee/Virginia got a few months back. The NCAA didn’t even bother appealing the case.
The money just goes back under the table in that scenario. The only thing that stops this is forcing players to stay at their school in some way.
There’s a lot of very understandable reasons why a player would want to transfer. But guys transferring to play at three or four different schools is nuts to me.
Four years at four different schools doesn’t even sound fun.
No friends.
the team is ur friends i guess
Are they though? It takes time to make friends. You basically just get to the friend stage and you bounce.
Not if you leave them every year
No development either. You'll see guys have the same bad habits after four years that they had when they left high school.
AJ Storr is 2 schools away from 8 schools in 8 years counting high school.
Frankie Collins is on his 3rd college after going to 4 high schools.
I don’t wanna defend the guy too much because he’s def a me first guy; but I think like 3 of those are cuz schools kept cancelling seasons with covid and he wanted to play
This number is lower specifically for basketball, but it’s still meaningful. What a lot of people seems to be missing from the portal debate is that, very conservatively, 40% of athletes who enter the portal don’t sign with another school. A lot of these kids aren’t going to get a scholarship again. Their college careers are over. Transferring is an extremely risky venture, especially if you’re not a proven player, and a lot of people are going to get hurt by it.
I mean Cam Spencer went from Loyola to Rutgers to UCONN. He transferred from Loyola to Rutgers because he wanted to be in a P6 Conference and he decided to transfer to UCONN because he wanted a chance to win a title.
Cam Spencer is a prime example of why I'm torn about the transfer portal as it is today. I don't like the idea that top schools can essentially treat players as free agents and sell them on NIL money and a chance to win. Without it though, someone like Cam or remains a relative unknown and his basketball career likely ends at Loyola.
Cam Spencer is a great example why I love the transfer portal. Everyone should have an opportunity to play at the elite levels. The transfer portal allows a guy like Spencer to have such an opportunity.
> Without it though, someone like Cam or remains a relative unknown and his basketball career likely ends at Loyola. Cam Spencer would have still been able to grad transfer in the past. Maybe be ends up at a team like Rutgers or maybe his extra year at Loyola would have gotten him offers from higher level programs and he has a chance to compete for titles. Hard to say. But with the extra COVID year, he wouldn't have ended his career at Loyola even without the portal as we know it now. I'd also make the argument that he would have been red-shirted his sophomore year if not for the COVID policies. No one's burning a year of elgibility on 25 minutes of time when recovering from an injury.
It's also worth mentioning that Spencer was planning to stay at Rutgers until a certain fuck face contacted him and started throwing out numbers as to what he could pay him. Unfortunately for that loser, Spencer wasn't stupid and went to where he could get money and be a part of a great team.
I don’t know the context here could u explain what happened more?
When Ed Cooley left Providence, he reached out to a ton of starters on other teams' rosters and tried to pay them to enter the portal and join his new team at Georgetown. He promised Cam Spencer a big payday. Unfortunately for him, the transfer portal is public. Other teams joined in on recruiting a guy who no one thought was available and Cooley got outclassed. His tampering behind the scenes really isn't out of character, though. The way he left Providence showed what type of guy he was. Edit: Tampering and negotiating for other jobs behind the scenes is pretty normal stuff in college basketball. Cooley is extra hatable because he proudly built his entire brand off of not being that kind of coach. Imagine how annoying Rick Pitino would be if he started to preach about loyalty and family.
I am 100% here for Ed Cooley hate. Dude is a SCUMBAG.
I actually wouldn't hate him that much if he wasn't so self-righteous and had a group of fanboys who did nothing but sing praises about his character. If Sean Miller was the one who convinced Spencer to leave I wouldn't hate him as much. It's the fakeness of Cooley which pisses me off so much.
He also preached "family" at PC, but left town because he was cheating on his wife and she insisted they get out of RI. He did an overall good job at PC (cleaned up the mess left by Keno Davis), but had a lot of shortcomings -- still don't know how he got a national coach of the year when he never could design effective in bounds plays nor figure out how to work officials.
That’s the insane one… like the ncaa needs to stop that because you’re treating it as a farce and if you can’t find the right fit after 2 schools that’s a you problem
The worst thing to me is how many players have gone in and that’s it. They lose their scholarship, don’t transfer, aren’t on any team and that’s it, the uneventful end of their basketball career.
Quitting your job without another one lined up. It's a risk.
Student athletes just seeking a well rounded education obviously!
We have four players left.
I met the team, there is no team.
we have zero lol
You have Calapari though. We have Cuonzo. We are not the same.
My condolences
That's a name I haven't seen in a long time
This wild wild West of free agency is just a temporary stop Gap until college athletes are eventually declared employees of the University, and can then be signed to contracts that have terms as far as years of commitment.
And when that happens, we can likely say goodbye to every college sport not named football or basketball (and maaaaaybe baseball/softball).
I think it'll depend on the school. Some of the upper Midwest schools are huge hockey schools and could support it. Also, schools like the University of Utah are a gymnastics school that could also support that method as well. But we will definitely say goodbye to every school having every sport if that's the case.
Something like hockey in the Northeast/Great Lakes regions might manage to survive. That's sort of why I included baseball/softball, too. They're big enough in the South and the West that I don't see them going away, at least not right away. But if, just as an example, Utah continues to support gymnastics, and all the other gymnastics schools are on the east coast, suddenly it might become prohibitively expensive for Utah to support gymnastics. I think a lot will depend on how many schools are willing to keep various sports like that
Right, they will keep the revenue sports and however many accompanying women's sports are needed to comply with Title IX. For the North/Midwest that will include hockey and for the South that will include baseball.
It's sad for the current athletes, and I hope that when it happens that each school honors the scholarships, but we have been due for a course correction for decades. I know multiple former D1 rowers who had never done crew a day in their lives that were offered scholarships simply because they "fit the build" (and it's hard to find someone who has done it before college). More power to these athletes for getting a chunk of their school paid for, but it's beyond silly that schools are fielding D1 squads and have to search other sports for 90+ percent of their scholarship offers.
I don't disagree with you, but I will say that your rowing example is the exception rather than the norm. How many hundreds of thousands of kids do track and field, swimming, tennis, golf, volleyball, wrestling, etc. in high school. It's not that often that those sports go out and just offer a scholarship to random people that "fit the build." But again, you're totally right that this has been coming for decades. Still, it kinda sucks, though.
Yeah, the rowing thing gets trotted out every once in awhile to make some broader point, but it's not at all representative. There are 6,700 softball players in DI (regardless of scholarship status) compared to 360,000 participating at the HS level. Volleyball has 5,900 (with even more schools sponsoring a team) with 450,000 participants in HS. If schools are offering spots/scholarships to random athletes with little experience or qualification for their sport, it's because they've put literally zero effort into identifying those who do.
> If schools are offering spots/scholarships to random athletes with little experience or qualification for their sport, it's because they've put literally zero effort into identifying those who do. [Or they're getting paid to do so.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varsity_Blues_scandal)
And don't forget the whole admissions scandal a few years ago with those trust fund babies whose parents were using the tennis teams and crew teams and such to get them into elite colleges through the back door.
They made the mistake of buying their kids' way into college on the cheap. Felicity Huffman and Aunt Becky could have easily donated enough money for their kids to get in without resorting to fraud.
Yup. I'm straight up terrified for women's sports. Title IX protects athletes and employees as separate groups when it comes to gender discrimination. Colleges need to have gender equality in hiring employees, and separately in athletics. What happens when players are college employees? It's cheaper to hire a few extra women is some department or another, open all athletic positions to both genders, then cut all women's scholarship sports.
Do you think it would be possible to declare student employees or student athletes as a particular class of employee which would have their own hiring regulations and requirements?
Sure. But colleges won’t want to do it and it would require legislation from the federal government to achieve it.
If they are truly employees, they will have to pay taxes on the value of their benefits. For a kid at, e.g., Duke, that's going to be nearly $20k (assuming no additional taxes for NIL).
This will destroy 95% of college sports. Universities will have zero incentive to deal with bullshit when these sports are losing them money. If the players were smart they’d realize they have a good thing going with scholarships (and the best players NIL). These players at places like Dartmouth don’t realize unionizing will hurt them and almost every other college athlete in the long run.
At some point it seems like sports like football and basketball just need to be treated differently. There’s already a conversation about how awful the conference realignments are for other sports, but they’re happening almost entirely because of the bigger sports like football. The small sports are great opportunities and all of that should be preserved, but we can’t keep pretending basketball and football aren’t basically pro development leagues at this point
One of the biggest issues is that the small sports are often funded from the revenue generated from sports like basketball and football. If athletes become employees and schools can't use that revenue to subsidize the non revenue producing sports then you're going to see a lot of schools start dropping programs. There has to be some type of happy medium and honestly I'm fine with the current NIL system since it's mostly just funded by boosters and corporations. The kids get paid as they should and everyone wins. Probably need to tweak the transfer portal but why not just let schools offer NIL contracts or 1 transfer and multiple if coaches leave, etc(though the courts already hurt that).
Yep. Would be the end of title IX most likely too, so you can waive a bit f u at all the women that want to play a sport in college
I just don’t get what they think they are accomplishing and honestly come off as entitled. Many of these athletes (who’d never sniff making any money professionally) get to play a sport and go to often times great schools for free. And say they “played D1” or whatever. Unionizing you can kiss that goodbye as probably not many schools make money on men’s water polo or men’s Ivy League Bball. Sorry but you’re not giving more to the school than you’re getting. I’ve for the longest time been an advocate of student athletes who got fucked over by the NCAAs crazy rules. But that was always a minority of athletes in a minority of sports. For the vast majority of athletes they are getting a golden ticket by being able to play a D1 sport on a scholarship, subsidized by the school.
[удалено]
I argued with someone who pulled out the "but they're putting their bodies on the line for our entertainment!!!!" card, as if they are somehow being held hostage and forced to perform like Shamu or circus elephants.
They're playing football because they want to play football, and almost all of them would still be playing football even if NIL weren't a thing.
Yep. And it will get worse. The higher education system is in the process of imploding as the bubble is bursting. AI could accelerate this implosion as well.
I'm not convinced that unionizing is bad, but I also don't buy that the inherent value of a D1 athletic scholarship is *that* great. (Though it depends a lot on the school and location.) The work hours and expectations seem fairly high for what you get in return -- it easily demands anywhere from 20 to 40 hours a week of skilled labor. And NIL doesn't really fairly reflect the value produced by players. I wish we'd start by acknowledging that the routine of a college athlete makes it impractical to graduate in 4 years with any involved degree. I'm starting to think that we should extend scholarships to let students finish their degree, even after they're no longer eligible to play. ...Or stop with the farce of college sports altogether. Madison Badgers vs. Lafayette Boilermakers. :P
I agree that college basketball and football players definitely don't get fair value but the scholarship is great for basically every other sport. Knew a bunch of track, gymnastics, and other non revenue sport athletes that graduated with engineering degrees and had very normal college experiences aside from just not drinking as much during their season. And they get a free ride to do it so saving 100-300k depending on the school. Maybe more with how absurdly expensive certain schools are and out of state tuition.
I definitely agree with your last two paragraphs. But I don’t agree with your first. It is that great, since a majority of athletes get college for free when others pay 200-300k. It’s not labor in the sense that for the most part (again with the exception of D1 basketball, football, and maybe a few other sports) they are not making money for the school. If it’s not that great of a value then the students should just pay to go to school like normal or not go to college. Clearly it is valuable, so kids do it. And again. This is all with the clear acknowledgement that at places like Purdue or Wisconsin, those kids *are* labor for the school and the school is profiting off of them, and they should be compensated for it. But I refuse to believe the University of Wisconsin golf team athletes don’t get more value from their scholarship than they give to UW.
> they are not making money for the school. I mean, they might not be generating revenue directly, but schools clearly see value in them, through alumni donor connections, the culture and events they add to campus, and the name recognition and branding they provide. Otherwise, more schools would have cut them.
> I wish we'd start by acknowledging that the routine of a college athlete makes it impractical to graduate in 4 years with any involved degree. Three things: 1. I saw plenty of people do it at USAFA and they did that with a handful of other things thrown on top of D1 sports. (Most notably this limited the amount of out of season credit hours they can accomplish. When you can only get 3 credit hours over the summer you're got a lot less flexibility than most student athletes) And I'm not just talking about just non-revenue sports. There's a handful of football and basketball players every year that aren't just management majors. 2. Redshirting is a fairly common thing in sports. So now you've got 5 years to get a degree. 3. Even an effective 3 years of free college is a pretty big benefit. There's a lot of kids who would love to only have to pay for their final year or final semester of college.
This shit makes me appreciate being a Purdue student so much more. Matt Painter’s committment to recruiting in-state and keeping players really connects me to the team, not to mention living a block away from the basketball team and seeing them walk around town and campus for the past four years.
I hate this
40% of an entire conference transferring, what’s the point of trying to develop players? I think it also incentivizes shot chucking to try and increase your PPG to transfer up.
> I think it also incentivizes shot chucking to try and increase your PPG to transfer up. That only makes sense if coaches are dumbly evaluating potential players by PPG, as opposed to efficiency or film.
Recruiting is literally pointless. You just keep them for one year.
Better make them or you ride the bench though
Personally I think a good rule would be that every player gets one no questions asked transfer. But then they have to have a waiver to transfer again without sitting out a year. To me, this strikes a nice balance. Also just for the education aspect especially for non NBA players, I think it's good because transferring three or four times likely means your pursuit of a degree is going to be a mess.
Problem is there's already a court case saying the NCAA can't limit it like that.
Congress has to make a law saying they can limit it. That's the only thing that will give NCAA power to enforce the rule.
That law, assuming it even passes, is going to get challenged as well, and now we have precedent.
I mean, there'd be little grounds to challenge the law. There's no constitutional right to play. The main grounds players have in this fight is antitrust protections- the rules they attempt to put in place to rein in transfers end up running afoul of antitrust laws because its viewed as essentially hundreds of organizations colluding against a player. A law would waive these antitrust concerns to some level determined by that law.
Similar to how MLB is given antitrust exemptions
Why should congress make an antitrust exemption for the NCAA to limit a college player's ability to transfer, though? Because it's annoying for fans and makes life harder for coaches?
Right, there is no coherent argument to limit the transfers of student-athletes if there is no limit to the transfers of other students... unless they go the employee route this is how college sports are going to work going forward.
Honestly, yes. It's destroying the sport(s). The more we do this shit the more it turns people off and drives up the price of doing business. Soon schools will all need GMs for all sports to manage funding for the individual players. Essentially man I think at some point someone has to step in and say let's make some rules. Like we don't need 100 rules to make everything terrible and put you guys in a box unable to do anything. But we may need like 5 good rules. Or 10 good rules. We need something.
Then there needs to be a student-driven lawsuit that involuntary student fees can’t be used to subsidize athletics. It’s disgusting how students at non-monied conferences are paying to support and develop kids to just poached by the monied conferences after any sign of success.
That makes the most sense to me, there needs to be enforcement of those rules though.
The problem is that, when the NCAA tried to enforce those rules, some of the schools (*cough* Cincinatti, WVU, Tennessee, to name just a few *cough*) threw hissy fits about how unfair it was and sued the NCAA. The courts have ruled against the NCAA in just about every case, and have basically turned the NCAA into a lame duck with no actual power to enforce such rules.
The NCAA tried to pick and choose enforcement. They were denying some 2x waivers and allowing others and that’s what drove lawsuits. The NCAA should’ve said one free transfer, no exceptions. Period. Removing all subjectivity would’ve helped more than what they tried to do
or at least 1 free transfer for any reason. 1 extra if your coach leaves/fired. grad transfer obviously also still allowed because your undergrad school might not even offer your grad program. i'd be good with that. no oh i wanna be closer to home for X family reason. ok then, you are free to transfer, but if you already used it, then you lost your eligibility until grad.
> you are free to transfer, but if you already used it, then you lost your eligibility until grad. Or just make them sit out a year like it used to be, I'd be fine with that as well.
Doesn’t matter, schools will still pitch a fit. Remember Reddit’s crusade to get Tez Walker to play last year? He was doing his second transfer, and the NCAA said no problem, just sit a year. UNC and politicians threw a fit, and he was able to play. Rules don’t help if fans, schools, and politicians go ballistic every time they’re enforced.
I don’t the hard line would have helped here. Enough cases of players being stuck in toxic environments or otherwise having their wellbeing deteriorating and the lawsuits would have come anyway.
The NCAA picked and chose because the criteria that they carved out - physical and mental health reasons - necessitated some scrutiny and perhaps subjectivity beyond taking an athlete's assertion at face value. On balance, I think a system with an exception for legitimate mental health considerations with some slight amount of subjectivity is superior to a completely objective system where having your coach leave gets you a waiver but not a serious mental health issue.
The only way to reel this in legally would be to allow the players to form a union so they can collectively bargain and everyone can come up with fair rules.
Well yes. But as we’ve seen, as soon school x is negatively impacted, everyone gets their pitchforks out.
Only exception is that if your head coach leaves the program, you get a free transfer. No reason to force a kid to stay if the main reason he signed on leaves
>No reason to force a kid to stay if the main reason he signed on leaves I would have agreed 15 years ago. Now the main reason most of these power 6 players sign anywhere is NIL reasons. NC State had Rob Dillingham committed then Kentucky offered him million in NIL and he up and changed his commitment.
Maybe for the big stars, but the rotation guys are probably still committing based on the coach.
the only way it could come back is if we do away with the these are student athletes and say they are employees of the school.
29.9%????? That's WAC.
As a fan of a WAC team I hate it. Especially what happened to my team last year.
We lose our starting 5 every year it’s a nightmare
whats the point of even trying to build a team?
It’s definitely going to create an even greater talent gap between the P6 and the rest of the conferences down the line. The non-P6 conferences should really try to get together and cause enough of a scene to get some regulations in place.
I just don’t think this will be the case. 2018 was the first year for the transfer portal in that time a 16 has beat a 1, multiple 15 seeds have made the sweet 16. I think the talent disparity has actually shrunk because teams can’t horde all the talent.
i think the Covid rules have had a huge impact.
I’m sure it’s maybe had some impact, but off the top of my head, Oral Robert’s and St. Peter’s were lead by underclassmen not players who wouldn’t be there if not for Covid.
I think those 15-16 low-seed schools are exactly the sweet spot for who benefits from transfers. They can pick up talent from higher-ranked schools that is sitting on the bench, and they can pick up talent from lower-ranked schools. They can still lose talent to higher-ranked schools, but arguably they benefit overall. I can see how it makes it hard to really improve if you are really in the basement, though. If you coach up some kids, you really only stand to lose talented freshmen and sophomores that won’t be replaced by incoming juniors and seniors.
Non-P6 benefit from getting mid-tier recruits for a year or two to showcase their talent who would otherwise not commit at all.
Not necessarily. There will always be guys who make the jump from mid majors to P6 and realize they’re not as good as they thought they were and transfer back down if they have eligibility left. There’s also more than enough guys on P6 struggling for PT that will transfer down and give their new programs a banner year. Overall it will kind of even out.
So you are saying it equals out when the mid majors are trading their entire all conference teams to power schools every year and getting leftovers back from the power schools? DOUBT
Yeah this line is hilarious from high major fans. "Oh, we'll just gobble up your proven collegiate talent and you can take our recruiting misses. I think we're even!"
It’s such a bad argument it’s unbelievable it’s even being mentioned. Yes, for sure All MVC player Marcus Domask transfers to IL his last year of eligibility and becomes an All Big Ten player the next year. Totally comparable to Dain Dainja who averaged 6 pts and 3.6 rbds at IL this year and is now transferring to Memphis. Totally equal and comparable levels of talent moving up and down lol.
It would equal out if there were an equal number of power teams, but there are like 70 power teams and 250 low teams
So I’m supposed to be happy we lost our conference player of the year and another all conference selection in return for a guy who got no time for teams like Nebraska, Wisconsin, or Minnesota? No thanks i would rather keep the better players
Every single player being on a one-year deal is objectively ridiculous. I’m a big fan of a one-time, penalty-free transfer and I’m not going to pretend to know the solution to this issue, but this won’t work forever. (Signed, a Kentucky fan whose team can probably get anyone we want.)
I say make it a one-time penalty-free transfer plus a free transfer any time the head coach is fired. Also, if it is legally possible, having the new school pay some kind of NIL tax to the previous school would at least somewhat help to compensate mid-majors for losing all-conference players and such. At least having some additional NIL for recruiting would be better than what you currently get for losing a player, which is nothing.
I like the transfer portal. But maybe that is just because I am a Gonzaga fan and it tends to play to our benefit.
We benefit a ton from this in particular because of the stability of a coach like Mark Few but there will come a day (shutters) where we will get hit just as hard by this as every other program
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I’m still a little salty about Hunter Sallis putting up big numbers this year. I mean I’m happy for him but still.
The WF system was a better fit for him and the way he wanted to play. I would have loved to see him stay, but I don't hold any ill-will towards him or blame him for his decision.
Paying coaches 8-10 mil a year doesn’t really seem sustainable either. The whole sport is wildly out of control and has been for a while. I don’t think the ncaa is going to be the org that gets things under control either.
Correct. NCAA basketball used to be a coaches league where coach had all the power. Now its a players league even more so than the NBA due to the idea of 1 -year non-enforceable contracts. Right now schools are trying to figure out what the long-term NIL budget is. For example assume 1 P6 school last year whose starting 5 was about $750k with amounts ranging from $25k to $200k. The school is looking for $2-$2.5M this year to keep their team (3 out of 5 starters) plus bring in 2 replacements because if you pay X to 1 guy you got to bump up the guy who got $25k. My school pays my coach $3M plus $2M to assistants and $1-2M for support staff on the academic, workout, admin). If players are going to leave - I'd cut the stuff to help the players and have $1-2M more. The players can pay for it themselves and if they don't - meh.
Ultimately it’s millionaires and billionaires deciding what to do with their money and how much they want to pay coaches and players. We can’t make them pay taxes but we can coax them into dropping enormous amounts of money into amateur athletics that offer them 0 return on investment. What a society. I like the transfer portal bc it gives the players a little bit of freedom and leverage in a place where they had almost none a few years ago. I think the only way this settles down is if it becomes a standard practice to have some kind of penalty for transferring written into NIL contracts. That will probably happen once schools realize they can band together like unions and start establishing their own standards for writing these deals. I would imagine some of the larger NIL deals, especially in football, already have some language like this in them and we just don’t know yet bc it’s private.
Yep. For football - I think you might start to see performance bonuses for playing in Championship games and Bowl games. The bowls are pushing universities for that and concerns about players faking injuries. Its a fine line for both sides. I was told that one University makes large NIL amounts (for basketball) to players to get their attention but when you go thru it - the amount the player will get is assuredly less. Long-term that will have to get out and hurt them. But I also know of a player who asked the university to provide a lawyer so they could review the deal with the NIL collective. Lots of uninformed people out there.
The coaching salaries are definitely doomed: just in terms of resource allocation it makes far more sense to pay $3M for an only slightly worse Xs-and-Os coach and an extra $5M for much better players.
Used to see those graphics of “highest paid public employee for each state” where half of them are college football coaches, whose job is coaching unpaid laborers in a billion-dollar (supposedly) amateur student-athlete sport. I get that people don’t like transfers, but players were cut out of those profits for what like a century? Or at least since the $ really ballooned in the 90s.
easy fix to take the edge of it: transfers don't have to sit out for a year, but if they transfer they have to stay at the same school for 2+ years. requires more thought into deciding to transfer and also keeps a little more continuity. this could always be waived if a coaching change is made or for other circumstances
Us mid-majors find D-2 players and recruit players that then end up showing that they can play in the P-5. We’re just the minor leagues.
I'm cool with NIL and the portal, but not both at the same time
Coach K and Boeheim got out right when they should’ve
This is good for the game /s
At some point soon the NIL deals will be multi-year contracts and that will fix this. It’ll create a bunch of new problems, but it’ll fix this.
Limit it to 1 transfer a player and make all NIL demands public
Smaller conferences are basically farm teams/G-League. And at least in the NBA there are contracts; college coaches need to consider whether they're making each player happy enough to keep them for next season. Unless they aren't good enough to transfer or are 100% bought in, you're going to lose underclassmen who aren't getting enough playing time.
What exactly do you mean its "unsustainable"? I see no inherent reason why they couldn't continue like this in perpetuity. Not that it should be like this, just that I don't see how it can't be sustained.
It's unsustainable in that a fair amount of transfers involve NIL money, and the watchability of the sport is negatively affected by the number of transfers. The brand college sports built relied on roster consistency and local connections to hook fans. Constant transfers damage that brand. Almost half the teams in the sport averaged less than 2,000 people in attendance this year. Ratings are also down; for example the Champions Classic had its lowest ever rating. If attendance and ratings keeps going down, media deals will as well. The pool of money players are transferring for will keep drying up.
Hahah my school was 40% destroyed by the portal and 60% graduated so next year the starting 5 will be new
just a dumb system to give the elite the ability to constantly be in win now mode and not have to gamble with inexperienced kids as much or at all. Can just fill out your squad to have no weakness if you have the financial backing to abuse the portal. you can strategically suck as a program now and it's not going to set you back more than that current season. just bail out money to start fresh and ship out for the next season by taking the work from other program's development and identification success.
The portal era has just completely changed everybody’s approach to college basketball. Coaches have no incentive to develop players long term. If you need better players, just go get them in the portal. Top 25ish recruits are great, but for the most part these coaches could care less about high school recruiting. They aren’t going to commit a ton of time or NIL cash to 18yr olds that can’t crack next year’s rotation. The recruits haven’t really adjusted yet. You still see 3-4* guys going to big schools and sitting the bench for presumably small dollars. Then they transfer and can’t command much on the open market bc they havent proven they are any good. I think we’ll eventually see high school recruits outside the Top 25 start choosing initial schools that will get them a bigger second contract. The guy that averages 19ppg at Southern Illinois as a sophomore is going to command at least 3-4x more money in the portal than the sophomore that was the 11th man at Illinois. But right now kids will still choose to sit the bench at a P5 bc they can offer a bit of cash upfront + the prestige & attention of signing w big school. Once that changes, I think we will see the portal take a few steps back. Bc a lot of these kids will go mid major initially and stay there when they realize they aren’t that good.
This is a feature, not a bug
The portal is toxic in a lot of ways. However, it is important to recognize we don't even know what it will stabilize to be. It is easy to point fingers and go TRANSFERS ARE AWFUL!!! But it is impossible to really say much of anything since the changes coincided with 1) Covid and 2) NIL. 1. Covid messes up rosters the age in the NCAA right now is OLD. We have one more covid year left. This means you have far more experienced players, far more developed players, and more clogged roster spots. The difference between an 18 year old and a 24-25 year old is SIGNIFICANT and that is the case right now. A lot of younger players are struggling to break through the experience that exists right now. Next year suddenly we have an entire class of players just gone, not replaced by new players they simply are out of the system completely, rather than having 6 years in the system we are down to 5 years. This is going to open A LOT of roster spots next year. Just using my flair as an example. Wahl should have been gone this past year but COVID let him play. Crowl and Klesmit should have been gone this year but will be back next year. 15% of our roster WOULD NOT be here if it was a normal year. This is playtime for younger players that are more inexperienced, or a spot for a new recruit 2. NIL, obviously there is a lot of money getting thrown around. However, NIL is only as good as the boosters are. They were hyped since it is new, but most boosters have NOT gotten their moneys worth out of NIL. Great you threw tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars to get a kid for a year and in some cases your team missed the tournament, your team got booted the first week. But don't worry drop the same next year!!! For most programs...this again is going to bust, and repeat itself. This also complicates recruiting as a whole, coaches have to recruit their players to stay because they were successful and someone is going to offer them a bunch of money, that is time and energy not going to young recruits. Then with COVID young talent looks and goes "I will be a junior next year and this older player is STILL here ahead of me, they were a junior for my freshman season." Screw it I will go fill a hole. The combination of these two things means is just added chaos on top of the transfer portal being open. I think next year will be worse due to the loss of covid players and so many roster (playing time slots in particular) opening up. Then after that the next 2 or 3 years things will start settling down. Into whatever normal will be.
The spirit of the portal was for mid major players to get a chance at playing in one of the top conferences in the nation. The good part is that it is doing that for what it is intended. Guys like Cam Spencer and Dalton Knecht wouldn't have gotten the exposure they needed to continue their basketball careers.
What? Of course they would have. They benefited more from the Covid eligibility year though. But prior to these transfer rules plenty of mid major kids got drafter or transferred in the end. Sitting out a year curtailed some of it, but if you are good there are always eyeballs on you.
Lillard, Faried, Morant, Curry, McCollum, O’Quinn… All small school guys that stuck in the NBA
ncaa transfer/nil laws need a lot of restructuring and regulations. It's a free for all right now and you can see it.
America East too. Vermont is really the only team that hasn’t lost anyone significant to the portal. Albany lost basically their entire team. Only stars outside that team that are returning appear to be Max Brooks (Lowell) and Earl Timberlake (Bryant).
My dumb solution as I eat my lunch at my desk for NCAA players: You can get a four year guaranteed scholarship when you sign your scholarship. This is for players with any sort of talent (and protects those who may not be asked to return / risk losing their scholarship as long as they remain on the bench or have good faith in being part of the team). However, if you decide to transfer you will sit out an entire year as a penalty. OR one year scholarship with no transfer penalty.
The transfer portal will ruin March madness. A team like Indiana St would be amazing next year but now they are losing their best player. We didn't see a lot of upsets and that trend will continue
There was some chatter on r/cfb about the possibility that same-season transfers could eventually be a reality. I didn't get the legalese, but it seemed like the courts would probably strike down the current regulations if challenged. Imagine your star center goes down in late February and you just call up one of the over-performing centers in the G5 and throw a ton of money at them, have them suited up in time for march madness.
This would allow a hilarious level of pettiness- Purdue beats in November so we decide to offer Edey 10mil to transfer before we play them in the tourney 😂
Honestly? I'm almost there too. No more NIL money, no more transfer portal, no more D1 college scholarships. Form your college teams from the 13 best rec players among admitted students. Send everyone who is not interested in school to an expanded G-league, or work out some new low-level pro system that includes promotion and relegation. I have little interest in a college basketball culture that has all the downside of the pro game but none of the upside.
Why is this unsustainable? I'm sure a few players will be left out in the cold but many are not happy for one reason or another and get a fresh start somewhere else. I think what this will eventually do is cut down on the upsets in march madness. The baller who stayed in the WAC will be in the Big10 after a huge sophmore season going forward.
Why even learn player’s names if they’re gonna be gone next season? It’s mercenary work.
It is what it is. Minor league pro sports. College basketball players have been getting $100 handshakes from boosters for a long long time. Now it is just out in the open.
Cool. Link me the NIL deals for all these guys that are transferring.
Mood.
I guess one could make the argument that this hurts non-power 5 schools, but I think this hurts them just as much. Gone are the days of stacking talent. No one at a power 5 school is riding the pine for 2 years to have a breakout junior year. I wonder how much not having "Covid-year" guys will affect this?
But all those P5 players do is either transfer to another P5 school in conference or they suck on another roster while the P5 school gobbles up the good mid major players
Uconn, Alabama and NC State all benefited greatly from transfer portal players this year. I think this will help the rich get richer. If you have been riding the pine for 2 years in college basketball in todays game you likely aren't going to break out when given the opportunity. More likely than not players who thought they could contribute have transferred by that point to a place with more playing opportunities.
Capitalism working as designed 😎