2022 college basketball coaching carousel of progress

Yep. Isaiah Wilkins started at Wake and Virginia Tech and then transferred to Longwood to lead the Lancers to their first ever NCAA bid.

 

This is one instance in which a "good old days" reference is apropos.

I recall Lefty Driesell's Maryland teams of the late '70s and early '80s. They stuck together for 3-4 years, and those guys were household names in the DC/MD/VA area -- Elmore, McMillen, Manning, Bias, Buck Williams. The consistency made people want to follow them, and they could have made money with NIL were it around then.

Today? I just can't picture most of these guys being recognizable enough to be selling anything. In fact, top student-athletes at mid-majors might have a BETTER chance at making some coin, because they become more of a part of some of these remote locales.

 

Does Kennedy have any expectation that the players will graduate if he is rnnning kids off like that?

 

I understand that to a degree. But the brand of the school is directly related to the success of the team.

Let's use Indiana as an example. Indiana is an Adidas school. Maybe the Hoosiers get five million a year from Adidas. Adidas could instead go the the McDonald's All-American game and sign up as many promising players as they could on longer term contracts with the five million dollars. Most of the contracts would be overpays but you would hit on some future NBA stars on the cheap. Then Adidas steers the kids to select schools. Is Mike Woodson going to walk away from a five-star because the kid already has a shoe contract, knowing that other schools in the conference would take him? I doubt it. Because the teams with the most talented players generally win.

By playing the palyers directly the company cuts out the middleman.

 

Is that even a consideration anymore? NBA is the toughest league to break into but it’s also got the most players with unrealistic expectations. That means the college players are most susceptible to being used.

 

Even at the mid-major level about 20 years ago, the amount of academic support available to athletes was... a lot, from my observation. I have to imagine it has only increased. This is an in-house number from the NCAA, but 90 percent of D-I athletes graduated in 2021, vs. 74 percent in 2002. Over the past 20 years, it's been an 18-point jump in D-1A football and a 28-point jump in men's basketball. (And I know this will SHOCK everyone, but it's probably just a coincidence that in that time span, there were also punishments tied to not graduating players, with the APR.)

 

But my question is this. Will the amount of athletes graduating decrease because of the additional movement of athletes, both voluntarily and involuntarily?

 

Maybe? I kind of doubt it, though. I imagine regular students who transfer are probably more likely to graduate than students who don't to begin with, though. Plus, plenty of players are allowed to "freely" transfer because they've gotten their degree already.

 

What D3 player is fucking around with the portal? The point of playing D3 is getting into a better school than you could ever hope for and connections after graduation.

 

NIL for the most part is just a payout from wealthy boosters who want to support their program and/or now don’t need to go under the table. Good for the kids, but it’s likely is rarely an objective economically reasonable deal for the entity paying

 

Certainly there isn't the same number of D3 players in the portal but I've seen guys who knew they were riding the pine go elsewhere. I've seen 1 guy who was a 1,000 point scorer in two D3 seasons go to a Horizon League school.

 

Duncan Robinson is probably the most recent success story of a DIII guy making a huge leap and turning it into something amazing