(04-02-2024 06:22 AM)Polish Hammer Wrote: (04-01-2024 02:42 PM)axeme Wrote: The old system: good for coaches, good for fans, bad for players.
Today: bad for fans, bad for coaches, good for players.
Old and new: great for the NCAA’s coffers.
Is there a system that is equally good for all? Seems very unlikely. The pendulum has swung in the players’ favor after taking advantage of them for profit for decades.
But are they? Was it bad for all players or only some? And is it good now for all players or only some? There's quite a difference between perception and reality. Student-athletes were given a scholarship and opportunity to earn a degree to further a great career considering probably 99% go pro in something other than athletics. Now, they hear about the NIL and think they're going to get paid when only the elite athletes are pulling the vast majority of NIL deals. So between the NIL and thrill of being recruited over and over and over again they chase that by going into the portal where many get lost and never heard from again while again the elite athletes are again taken care of. And by bouncing around from college to college they exhaust their eligibility while losing credit hours on each transfer and wind up short of that degree, can't get a good job and still aren't pro sports caliber players. We'll be then told to feel sorry for these kids for making such poor decisions and don't forget to donate to your school's collective to help these vagabonds complete their course studies when they're done playing. I understand a one-time transfer, but some of these kids are on school #3 or #4, then count their prep programs as well as AAU programs and they've been in far too many programs in a short period of time.
It was bad for them because they basically had few options to determine their own future. Once they signed to a school, in a system that gave them no options to negotiate the terms of that signing, the only way they could leave was to be punished by sitting out a year and even then, their coaches could dictate some places they could not transfer to. It was a system than benefitted the coaches because they had essentially created the system themselves via the NCAA.
It is now good for them because they have some agency over their own lives and aren’t at the mercy of self-serving coaches and an inept organization that seemed to exist primarily to profit off the talents of the athletes.
Did some prosper in the old system and did it work well for them? Sure. Will some squander the opportunities in front of them now and come out worse than when they started? Undoubtedly. But they can choose their own path, make their own decisions, make some money that they were not permitted to make in the old system. A few will make a lot, most will make a little. But they will no longer be under the control of an inept organization that would punish them (and rarely institution or administrators) for “violations” that the courts quickly saw were real violations of our basic tenets of individual freedom, free market and free trade.
It will be ugly at times and some will make terrible decisions and some will benefit greatly. Fans will hate the result, unless their schools benefit from the portal more than suffer. Coaches, likewise.
It’s killing the major sports at our school, PH, and across the mid-major landscape, no doubt. It makes being a fan increasingly difficult. But it’s a reckoning that had to happen after decades of greedy and selfish control by an organization that seemed only to want to perpetuate itself and make billions it was increasingly unwilling to share with those who were earning that money for them.
This all could have been prevented with a fairer system for the athletes, but there’s no way the powers that be were ever going to give anything away unless they were forced to. Now they are rendered powerless by the courts and it’s totally their own fault.
This is too long. I wouldn’t read it.
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2024 MAC Men’s Basketball Transfer Portal
