As a sports journalist, the question I've gotten more than any other over the past several years is, "What in the hell is going on with college sports?" The changes are so profound and complicated, I'm not sure I or anyone else can completely understand them, but over the next two essays, I'll try to straighten things out to the best of my ability, because they do have ramifications for our sporting culture in general.
Now, three major developments have occurred in college sports that bent the landscape from the way things used to be. #1: The NCAA transfer portals, which enables athletes to easily jump from one school to another. #2: The adoption of the Name, Image and Likeness Act (NIL) that leaves college athletes being able to be paid by outside sources. And #3: The settlement of a lawsuit called House VNCAA, that led to a new system in which colleges can directly pay their student athletes; kind of an extension of the NIL.
Today, I'm going to talk only about the transfer portal. But first, it is incumbent upon you to realize one thing: the platonic ideal of the student athlete, that is the super talented jock who is also a prize-winning student, president of the student council, junior deacon at his church or whatever, has been long dead. Big time athletes at big time athletic universities are there primarily to play their sport. Period. End of story. There are certainly plenty of athletes who are also great students, but the idea that the "student" part comes before the "athlete" part is utter nonsense. Keep in mind, I'm talking about the big time sports universities, not what happens at Moravian or Muhlenberg or DeSales, or even the bigger schools like Lehigh and Lafayette.
Okay, let's get back to today's subject: the transfer portal. Basically, it guarantees college athletes movement without penalty — free agency, in effect, but even more freedom since things like salary caps don't have to be considered as they do in professional sports. The portal helps level a process that had long been unfair to student athletes. For decades, coaches were free to leave their school to take a job, but any student athlete who transferred had to sit out for a season, which is like a lifetime when you're 19 or 20 years old. And remember that high school athletes go to colleges most of the time because of the coach.
But here's the other side. You saw the massive effect the portal had this year in the NCAA basketball tournament. Much of the Madness went out of March Madness when all four #1 seeds (Duke, Houston, Auburn, Florida) made the final four. Almost the same case happened in the women's tournament, with UCONN the only non-#1 to make the final four, and they were so good they won the championship.
In effect, then, college basketball has become something like the NBA; the idea is to transfer enough times to create a super team, a formula Lebron James has used from time to time, for example. Powerhouse teams are now likely to have experienced players who have been to the post-season with other college teams. Most likely to lose out are the teams like Villanova; schools that traditionally rely on getting their players to stick around, grow together, turn themselves into a power team, rather than becoming one overnight.
Jay Wright, the outstanding Villanova coach (and a great guy, by the way), wouldn't exactly say that the portal forced him out, but he didn't exactly not say it either. You start losing people like Jay Wright, and another great coach like Virginia's Tony Bennett, who did blame the portal for his exit, and you better take a strong look at changing things.
