The stunning resignation of Virginia head men’s basketball coach Tony Bennett is the latest in a series of departures of high-profile NCAA head coaches like Karen Shelton, Jay Wright, Urban Meyer, Nick Saban, and Anson Dorrance.
Each of these coaches have had their reasons, stated or unstated, for stepping away from their respective careers.
But Bennett, in a statement last week, gave an unvarnished look at the state of college sports and how difficult it was to keep track of all of the variables in the sport today.
“The game and college athletics is not in a healthy spot. It’s not,” he said during his retirement press conference last Friday. “And there needs to be change and it’s not going to go back. I think I was equipped to do the job here the old way. That’s who I am.”
It was one of Bennett’s peers, UConn women’s basketball head coach Geno Auriemma, who criticized the presence of the transfer portal and how it and the name, likeness, and imaging frameworks are changing the sport for the worse.
“For 1,000 kids to be in that portal, that means there’s something wrong with the system,” Auriemma said back in 2021. “There’s something wrong with the recruiting system. There’s something wrong with the culture of college basketball today. There’s something wrong with the entitlement that happens to exist today.”
There have been a raft of transfers in many sports, and not just in the revenue sports of football and men’s basketball. Some transfers in the non-revenue department have been game-changers.
But in the revenue sports, the athletes’ respective prominence can give other players some ideas. The transfer of 13 players from the James Madison football team to Indiana University last year (helping to give the Hoosiers an undefeated record) should give every college sports program pause.
Could an entire college baseball infield, the first line of an ice hockey team, or a group of linebackers band together and shop for the best package deal from a university looking to make an improvement? Will specialists such as left tackles, lacrosse faceoff/draw specialists, field hockey dragflickers, or left-handed relief pitchers put themselves on the open market and change teams as readily as a businessman changes neckties?
We’ve all seen what has happened in the past, starting in the mid-60s when Don Drysdale and Sandy Koufax made the first attempts at breaking the reserve clause in pro baseball by insisting that the Dodgers negoatiate salary with both of them as a package. We also saw what happened when the Miami Heat were able to acquire Chris Bosh and LeBron James to join Dwyane Wade to form a so-called “superteam.”
Given the pressures put on college coaches to win, I think the pool of money already in college athletics is going to result in more coaches looking to opt out of having to deal with agents, boosters, sponsors, and NCAA regulators.
And I think it’s going to get worse before it gets better.
