As Final Four closes, basketball on unpredictable ground

HOUSTON (AP) — The transfer portal. Name, imageand likeness deals. Sixth-year seniors. Conference realignment. Theever-shifting prospects of the one-and-done rule.

The once semipredictable ground that underpinned collegebasketball has been changing at lightning speed over the past 24months, leaving coaches and their bosses scrambling to adjust towhatever comes next.

The NCAA Tournament closes out Monday when UConn plays San DiegoState, and will go down as one of the most unpredictable ever.Unanswered is the question of whether the shifting landscape incollege sports was the reason for all bracket madness or simplybackground noise for an event that is always hard to handicap.

Either way, things are changing and coaches are trying to adjuston the fly.

“These might be some of the greatest challenges we’re facingwith the portal and NIL and just lack of direction and rules andregulations,” said Mark Few of Gonzaga, a perennial powerhouse thathas reached the Sweet 16 in eight straight seasons.

The four teams that made it to Houston — Florida Atlantic andMiami saw their seasons end Saturday — got here in part becausethey adapted quickly. All four added players from the transferportal, some of whom were given an extra year of eligibility due tothe pandemic, and some of whom were lured by the promise ofsponsorship money under the loosely regulated NIL system.

Very few coaches want to go on record saying that allowingplayers to earn money through NIL or to freely move around in abillion-dollar business that imposes no such restrictions on thecoaches themselves is a bad thing.

Few also want to touch on the bottom line of conferencerealignment, which is placing familiar schools in strange places —Texas in the Southeastern Conference and UCLA and USC in the BigTen — in the service of generating more revenue.

And none want to be painted as dinosaurs who don’t believeplayers should share in the game’s considerable financialwindfall.

Some, however, concede they are uneasy about the implications ofall this.

“I wish someone would understand the effect of the system,”Florida State coach Leonard Hamilton said. “The story is the numberof kids who have been adversely affected by the climate as it istoday.”

Hamilton is not the only coach concerned by a recent NCAA studythat showed 43% of Division I athletes who enter the transferportal — taking advantage of their newfound ability to switchschools without having to sit out a year — end up without a placeto play.

“Is it great that 43% of young people decided to removethemselves from an experience of a lifetime?” said UMass coachFrank Martin. “People talk about a lot of the great thingshappening for young students now, but nobody really talks aboutthat.”

Now, the one-and-done rule, which used to be considered one ofthe biggest destabilizers in college sports, is barely a blip onthe radar. For most of the past year, the NBA had made it apriority to eliminate the 17-year-old rule from the upcomingcollective bargaining agreement. But that got scuttled at the lastminute, and the rule will remain.

“However it all shakes out, what I want is whatever is best forthe kids,” said Kentucky coach John Calipari, who for years hasembraced the one-and-done system.

Calipari said he’s more concerned about “27-year-olds playingagainst 19-year-olds.”

“I think that’s an issue that we’re going to have to deal withthat we’re totally avoiding,” he said.

The extra year of eligibility granted because of COVID-19,combined with redshirt years being handed out for varying reasons,has, indeed, extended some players’ careers into their mid-20s.

Exhibit A: Since the NBA trade deadline last month, the HoustonCougars, who came into the tournament as a No. 1 seed and wereousted in the Sweet 16, had a starting five that was older than thestarters for NBA’s rebuilding Houston Rockets.

Exhibit B: Including 25-year-old guard Adam Seiko, San DiegoState has four key contributors who are in their fifth or sixthyear of college.

The NCAA is taking somewhat of a passive approach to all of theissues. It has largely refused to get into the regulation of NILdeals, instead leaving it to state governments to decide. Lastweek, Congress held the latest in a series of hearings thatresolved nothing, even as the NCAA asks for a nationalstandard.

“I think one athletic director said that the only truth aboutNIL is that everybody lies,” the NCAA’s new president, CharlieBaker, said in a brief interview at the Final Four.

Baker would like to see the creation of a registry of contracts,financial literacy programs for families, a certification processfor agents and a uniform standard contract for NIL deals.

For now, though, NIL and the portal have produced afree-for-all.

It played out at FAU, where coach Dusty May said some of hisplayers were being approached while the team was in the middle ofits run.

In another instance, after a run to the Sweet 16 last season,Maryland’s women lost five players, including two who made it tothe Final Four with their new teams this year. (The Terps stillmade the Elite Eight this year.)

Before the tournament started, Belmont women’s coach JameyGivens, whose Bruins missed the tournament after upsetting Oregonin the first round, last year put a fine point on it, tweeting goodluck to all the teams in the tournament — “except for those whohave been actively recruiting off our roster all spring.”

Martin, a former high school math teacher who got fired at SouthCarolina five seasons after reaching the Final Four, has longleaned into the importance of athletes getting an education. He isalso a realist and an optimist, trying to thread the needle in arapidly changing landscape.

“For the most part, we tend to be fairly intelligent people whoadapt,” he said, “and we’ll figure it out, and we’ll adapt, andwe’ll grow.”