The Crazy Season!

It’s that time again—the crazy season after college football and basketball championships.

In recent years, especially in college sports, we’ve seen almost free movement between schools, no real penalty for transferring, and an ever-expanding transfer portal. It’s wild. Schools and coaches are now chasing unicorns, throwing money around, and players are taking huge risks with their careers—many never playing college sports again.

In the past, before NIL and the current state of NCAA rules (or the lack of them or their enforcement), the main question was whether eligible players would leave early for the pros—usually after one or three years, depending on the sport. Typically, a basketball team might lose one or two players, and football not many more. We were fine with that because teams generally stayed intact. We could rely on players’ loyalty to the school, and that continuity gave us a sense of identity and hope from season to season. We valued knowing the team would have another year together to get stronger, faster, and more skilled. The old “we’ll be better next year” idea actually held true, because you knew who “we” were.

Now, it truly is crazy times.

Players are entering the infamous transfer portal before they even get off the bus after their last game. Agents—yes, college players have agents now, which is another issue entirely—are on the phone shopping their clients to the next school for a better deal and a higher cut. Loyalty to schools has largely been replaced by loyalty to money. There are exceptions, of course, but if we’re being honest, that’s a very small percentage today.

I’m not blaming the players. Coaches and athletic directors are under pressure to maximize their investments, justify their rosters to their NIL collectives, and deliver wins. So they, too, are treating their teams like professional franchises—dropping and adding players wholesale to protect their jobs and satisfy their “investors.”

The downside is becoming painfully obvious. Many players who jump into the portal seeking better opportunities don’t land anything better. In the process, they lose the scholarship and spot they already had. More than a few coaches have said openly: if you enter the portal, you’re telling us you don’t want to be here and close the door behind them. A lot of those players end up having to drop down a division just to stay in the game. And we all know Division I “pays” better than Division II, and so on. It’s the sports equivalent of quitting your job with no other offer in hand, only to end up taking a lower-paying one because the dream opportunity never materialized. To me, that’s crazy.

Recently, President Trump convened a group of athletes and coaches to address this, in my opinion, craziness and the push to turn collegiate sports into fully professional leagues. In many ways, we’re already there: no meaningful limits on team-hopping, and players staying on rosters for six or seven years. You have 25-year-olds with families lining up against 18-year-olds, and we all understand the difference in maturity and physical strength those years create. The President’s Executive Order proposed limits on the number of transfers and years of eligibility. From what I’ve heard, the NCAA, the major conferences, and the schools have largely supported these efforts. It’s not hard to see why. Schools want to be financially stable again. They’re tired of watching millions flow out the door into facilities, programs, and players, while the business model becomes more chaotic with every passing season. That larger financial picture is the subject of an upcoming op-ed.

Sound crazy to you? It does to me.

Maybe I’m just an old soul longing for simpler times, when sports were more like a showcase of talent, teamwork, and school pride rather than a high-stakes business marketplace. When our alma mater could show the country that, simply because we went to school there, we were part of something special—“the best of the best,” at least in our own eyes. I miss the days when we didn’t have to endure a relentless barrage of transfer news, NIL drama, and social media noise year after year, and when we could reasonably expect our sports heroes to be there for us one more season. Maybe I’m the crazy one for still tolerating today’s version of collegiate athletics. Maybe I should just go back to watching my local high school games—though then I’d have to listen to parents yelling about playing time. Okay, maybe travel sports? No, that’s worse.

At this point, perhaps the sanest choice is to sit on a beach somewhere, listen to the waves, and remember when the games we loved felt less businesslike—and a little more like an enjoyable escape from reality!