This hasn’t gone how the NCAA planned it, and it’s teams like Xavier that have to put things back together.
Let’s start this off with a couple of basic suppositions. First, college basketball players should be getting paid. They are the product. They are the reason people tune in. A scholarship is a laughable amount compared to the revenue they generate. Secondly, college basketball players should be allowed to transfer. A history and political science major could hit up a different school every year and no one would care at all. Every student chases the best opportunities. Athletes shouldn’t be denied that.
For us here at Banners, those are non-negotiables. They are premises that the whole enterprise should be hung on.
But it’s hard to argue that college basketball is better off right now as a fan experience than it was a decade ago. The best four teams are in the Final Four. That’s excellent. The Sweet 16 was loaded with talent. Also excellent. Ratings for the first weekend were higher than they have been since 1993. The sport as a whole is doing very, very well. It routinely outdraws the NBA, which is three months of boredom stretched across an eight month season. The NCAA has created a system that produces a great product that people love.
And yet, something has been lost in that. Who is your favorite player on Xavier? Well, that’s a trick question, because there are no players on Xavier. Both incoming freshman are gone, Lassnia Traore is almost certain to go to Texas, and Roddie Anderson must surely feel like the last band member on the Titanic. Roddie has the most recent college basketball experience. The person at Xavier who has logged time on a court most recently after that? Dante Jackson.
And this isn’t just a Xavier issue either. Indiana saw every single scholarship player from last year leave. Robert Morris made the tournament, lost to Alabama, then lost every starter. There are well over 1000 players in the portal already. (Interestingly, over 10,000 D2 players hit the portal last year.) Even the teams in the Final Four are comprised largely of transfer players. Duke is getting feted for not having as many transfers, but that’s just because they are still using the old one and done method. Even Johni Broome, who feels like he has been at Auburn forever, is a transfer.
Some of this is because of the weirdness of the Covid season. Last year, a large percentage of the transfers were players with that extra year. This season will be the last where any player with an even semi-normal college progression will have that year available. That will likely lead to a dip in transfers next year, but there’s no question the number will still be massive.
And players have transferred for forever. People having a fit have forgotten that Tu Holloway, Jordan Crawford, Andre Walker, Travis Taylor, Brian Thornton, Jamel McLean, CJ Anderson, and so on and so on were all transfers. Transferring isn’t a new thing and it isn’t a bad thing. It’s just something that has come to the forefront recently. Coaches, also, just get to go wherever and whenever they want. Kevin Willard ditched his team before a Sweet 16 matchup so he could go whore himself out to Villanova. That’s an extreme example, but coaches leave all the time and no one bats an eye.
This is a lot of complaining with no real end. Here’s a very brief idea to make things better:
Change the dates
Does anyone want to be reading transfer portal news right now? The four teams that have been the best in the nation all year are playing to decide the national championship and most of the reporting is being done on who is leaving where. Move the portal date until the season is over. Compress the time into a three week span in which players can announce. Of course guys will have time to decide before then, but that would at least remove the stupidity that is Justin Pippen leaving Michigan before they were even eliminated from the tournament.
Introduce multi-year commitments
If teams could add a buyout to their NIL offers, players would stay longer. If Texas had to spend $1 million to buy out Xavier’s interest for next year in Ryan Conwell and then another $2 million to actually secure Conwell, they might think a little longer about it. Even if they did spend that money, they’d have less to poach players from other schools.
Limit the amount that can be spent
Maybe a salary cap is the way to go. The immediate issue is that we immediately go back to illegal payments, but policing that worked at times in the past. Again, limits on how teams could spend would limit the amount of players coming and going.
Re-introduce the second transfer penalty
This one is hard for me. I think players should be able to come and go as they please. On the other hand, some players are approaching a fourth year with four different schools. One transfer should definitely be free. With this idea the second would carry with it either the full year wait or something like a games limit. For high schools in Ohio players can transfer, but they then can only play the first ten games the following year. Doing something like that would make players at least contemplate if the really wanted to leave or were just bag chasing.
Xavier has a two players left and one is almost certainly on his way out. Richard Pitino will be building a roster from scratch. He’ll be doing it in a landscape that we’ve never seen before.