Stop the madness that is college sports! That is phrase I hear every day from collegiate fans, many that are soon to be EX fans. I addressed the insanity of the NIL (Name, Image, Likeness) in a post I did a few weeks ago. For those who did not see the post I am an advocate for the college athlete who has been taken advantage of for decades. I am not, however, for anything that has no structure, rules, or guidelines, and that includes NIL. As a former D1 player and D1 coach I know a little about the history of the NCAA. A lot of people have made a lot of money at the expense of college athletes. But now the current system, if you can call it that, is like a boat with no rudder. In this post I want to focus on the other threat to college sports that is equally unsustainable, called PORTAL.

Portal is a new term in college sports that means “the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.” But as the American humorist and author Erma Bombeck famously wrote “The Grass is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank.” That is a defining description of the current state of college football and basketball in this country with the PORTAL. I am not against a player transferring from ONE school to another for a legitimate reason; change in coaching staff, play closer to family, academic reasons, bad advise or no advise out of high school, etc. Everyone deserves a second chance. But when I am watching a basketball game on TV and the announcer says that player X has been to 3 or 4 schools, that is nuts. Here is a young man that is 24 or 25-years old playing college football or basketball at his FOURTH school. Loyalty, commitment, and perseverance seems to have gone the way of the dinosaur. And please do not blame this problem on COVID, that has not been a threat to young, healthy people for at least three years. Like so many things in this country we have “manufactured” reasons for people to excuse failures. Sports has always been a discipline where excuses, alibis, blaming others, and just plain negativity were not permitted. Full disclosure before I go on, I signed a scholarship to play basketball at the University of Missouri but transferred after one semester to go to Middle Tennessee State University. I grew up in a small rural town in southern Illinois and MU was just too big for me. I know some of you who are reading this will say “coaches change schools all the time” and you would be right. But in my 12 years of coaching in college I have found the best coaches, the ones who win, stay at a school an extended time. It takes TIME to build continuity, establish a system, and develop relationships with your players. The most difficult coaching job I had was coaching at a junior college. It was not the players that made the job so difficult (I did have a couple knuckleheads.) but the constant turnover. I was always recruiting and rebuilding. Tom Izzo, the HOF coach at Michigan State, has been a college coach for 45 years, said the portal and constant change makes it difficult to develop relationships with the players. In the same interview he said it is impossible to help a player reach his potential without constructive criticism, correction, and discipline. Those are positive aspects of teaching and maturing, not reasons to transfer. I would say that there are basically two reasons why a player transfers; not getting “enough” playing time, and now, the biggest reason NIL. The ease of transferring with no consequences is like the “wild, wild west”. I am afraid that when a lot of these young men get into their late 20s and are out of organized sports they are going to realize that they settled for the temporal instead of looking down the road at the long term benefits of perseverance, commitment, sacrifice, and loyalty. I think everyone who follows collegiate sports recognizes the problems with the PORTAL. How about some solutions?

There are several solutions to this portal problem that I would suggest. Let’s begin with a few positive solutions. As I mentioned earlier I think everyone deserves a second chance and for that reason I think any athlete should be allowed to transfer ONE time BEFORE their THIRD season without any consequences. They should be allowed to play immediately AND receive any NIL money they generate. ( In my first post I suggested some restrictions and guidelines for NIL.) Secondly, an athlete may transfer a SECOND time, without penalty, if that player has an undergraduate degree. That would encourage an athlete to graduate in FOUR years and pursue a Master’s or advanced degree. They would be eligible for a scholarship as well as NIL as long as they are working toward a Master’s Degree. They would be given 5 years of eligibility. Any athlete that transfers a SECOND time that has not received a bachelor or undergraduate degree MUST sit out one year and IS NOT intitled to NIL money. (They would not be generating any money so they would have to SURVIVE on ONLY a scholarship.) Thirdly, any athlete who transfers more than two times would not be eligible for NIL and would have to sit out one year. An athlete should only have SIX years to get their FOUR years of eligibility completed. The two exceptions would be the player who is working on an advanced degree AND any athlete who has sustained a injury that caused them to miss a year or in some cases even more that a year. When I played in the 1960s, during the time the dinosaurs roamed the land, every athlete was expected to take 14 or 15 credit hours a semester. We were expected to graduate in four years not six. Occasionally an athlete would need an additional semester or a summer school but that was also when we were considered “student-athletes.” We were not any smarter that the athletes today. The biggest difference was we were there to get a degree NOT prepare for the NFL or NBA. Sadly, many of these athletes are the real victims of this whole portal fiasco. As the commercial says “they are all preparing for a profession, it’s just not in the NBA or NFL”. Finally, this last statement may seem a little controversial but as a former coach, who has been in the arena, I do not think a player should be allowed to transfer to another school in the same conference UNLESS that school had offered that athlete a scholarship when he was in high school. There are several reasons why I think that but the #1 reason is the original coaching staff believed, invested, and sacrificed to help make that athlete what he is. One school should not be a “farm system” for another within the same conference. The “carrot” for the athlete that stays committed to his original school should be rewarded with a nice severance package. We reward CEOs that drive a company in the toilet with a severance package why not an athlete that contributed to a winning program. The college graduate (athlete) would leave college with a “nest egg” instead of a mortgage.

College sports is in trouble and even the casual fan knows it. A lot of those fans, like my son-in-law, have quit watching college sports. I love college sports too much to give up on it. I think sports have certain redeemable qualities that a young person (man or women) can not get anywhere else in our society. We have to institute some guidelines and rules that are fair and equitable for all programs, not just the “blue bloods”. The players are the “show” and must be compensated but not at the expense of everyone and everything else. There is a lot of angst in collegiate sports right now. I know we will never go back to the “good old day” and we shouldn’t. I believe there is enough money to go around without destroying mid-major programs, student-athletes, coaches, so-called minor sports, etc. We only need one NFL and one NBA. College sports are big business but it can not be ONLY a business. Americans (fans) still believe in fairness, still like an underdog, still believe in the impossible, and still like to think that loyalty is rewarded. There are a lot of things that we all want to escape from, if only for a few hours, I hope and pray that college sports does not become one of them.