The future of college athletics
Remember a couple of years ago, when we learned that players could easily negotiate the transfer waters through the transfer portal?
Remember a couple of years ago when legal eagles said players could earn compensation for their name, images and likenesses?
Remember when many of us, including yours truly (somewhat cautiously), celebrated the new direction in college sports?
How’s that working out for everybody? It’s working out great for the players.
Did anybody bother to take a gander at the NCAA men’s tournament Final Four? All four of the No. 1 seeds advanced. The technical term is called “chalk.” Did anybody notice that the Cinderella stories, e.g. Butler, George Mason, Virginia Commonwealth, Loyola-Chicago, Valparaiso, Murray State, etc., would filter their way deep into the draw?
Kiss those days goodbye.
Why? The mid-majors, generally speaking, don’t have the deep pockets of the D-1 college power brokers. If, say, Kentucky, Kansas or Duke loses players, they now just look into the transfer portal in an attempt to re-fortify their rosters. Rest assured, those transferees are looking for a payday, too.
I saw Rick Pitino, now the head coach at St. John in his native NYC, say that if he wants to go after a prospect in the portal, but doesn’t have the money, he calls his collective, or whomever, and says the Red Storm needs more money.
Voila, the funding magically appears.
Pitino even went so far to say that he’s not even looking at recruiting high school kids this year. A five-star prospect called Pitino to inventory the coach’s interest and Pitino said, “not interested.”
Can you imagine that? Saying no to a blue-chip prospect? That wouldn’t have happened three years ago. Now, when the season ends and players decide to seek greener pastures, coaches immediately check the portal to see who is available before hitting the recruiting trail.
Oh, how the late Larry Finch would have loved this era.
So, teams like UT-Martin, Southern Illinois, Jacksonville State, Stetson, et. al., are able to parachute in and scoop up some prize recruits, with which they will have moderate success for about a year, maybe two, before their blue-chippers bail for the fecund soil of big-boy basketball. Does Dalton Knecht ring any bells?
Once Knecht had enough of Northern Colorado, he dipped his toe in the SEC waters and Tennessee’s Rick Barnes scooped him right up, with great success. The move paid off for both because Knecht became a prize jewel for the NBA. I’m not sure he would have been someone NBA teams would have sought otherwise. Tennessee had a nice NCAA run as a result.
As former Alabama coach Nick Saban said recently, this current system isn’t sustainable. It’s killing the smaller schools; sports information directors are facing a dizzying array of players coming and going and those same players are all entering the college world with their hand out…and they aren’t reaching for a diploma.
Saban got out of coaching because of it. He’s not a young man anymore and constantly perusing the portal, then going out and trying to recruit a whole new team each year didn’t make the Alabama job as appealing as it was when he accepted the position in 2007.
It’s a free-for-all out there now, in all sports. Fans can’t rely on their favorite players to stick around for long, lest those players miss out on the bigger and better deal.
It’s time for someone to regulate this whole deal. D-1 college athletics needs a commissioner to oversee this whole process and meet fair measures to ensure that you don’t have a situation like baseball, where the Yankees and Dodgers get whomever they want and the rest suffer (though baseball has shown a bit of parity over the last decade or so).
Players aren’t making a 4-year commitment when they sign on to play for a program. The days where players played for four-plus years, eventually earned a degree and went on to bigger and better things, whether the NBA, NFL, or the world of the workplace, are now a thing of the past.
One could argue that players aren’t making any commitments to any institutions. They are committed to grinding that cheddar. College athletics is just a convenient lily pad for the players.
I shudder to think what college football and basketball will be like in five years if something isn’t done. Saban is right. This current system isn’t sustainable.
Jim Steele is a correspondent for Richardson Media Group and may be reached on X @steelesports or via email at pressbox1@gmail.com.
