College Basketball – One-Year Contracts

Current Climate Creations

(St. Louis, MO) – One-year contracts. That’s all we have in college basketball. Perhaps I am just waking up and understanding what has always been true. With the advent of instant eligibility for transfers, NIL, conference realignment and escalating coaches’ contracts, college basketball is nothing more than a series of one-year contracts.

Player ‘free-agency’ is here to stay and the ‘name-image & likeness’ revolution is just beginning. Coaches being hired and fired has always been a factor.  Ever-growing coaches’ salaries means there is also increased volatility on that front.

Rapid conference realignment is making this dizzying pace of movement by players and coaches even more bizarre. None of these things are singularly evil, detrimental, or un-American. When you add them all together in one, two-year time period, you have chaos in the game we love.

Culture versus Climate

College coaches talk constantly about building a culture, but let’s face it, the climate of college basketball is ‘look out for number one’. The quaint notion of ‘playing for the name on the front of the jersey’ is like saying elected officials represent their voters.

Every player, coach, university and conference has the right and the responsibility to make sure they are succeeding. So I have no complaint against any of these people or organizations, but I fail to connect the slogans with the choices.

We whine when a coach leaps from one job to the next, but also want them fired when they don’t win enough or the right games. University administrations preach commitment and faithfulness to State U, and they change conferences when it suits them.

In the last two years, Jacksonville State left the Ohio Valley Conference to join the ASUN, only to leave that league to join Conference USA, so how do we expect the players to stay loyal?

The climate is now, ‘get noticed and get out’. Win some games and grab the next gig. Score some points and hit the portal. Grow your fan base and run to the next league. College basketball is a series of one-year contracts.

NIL & Transfer Portal

Players should be able to cash in on their own ‘name-image & likeness’ and they should be able to transfer, but those two events coming of age at the same time has created a scenario that is untenable. Over 25% percent of the eligible college basketball players transferred last season and nearly 40% (1,393 so far) more followed suit this year.

If these players are student-athletes, tell me how their education is progressing with three institutions in three years. These one-year contracts are not helping them get a degree and 99% of them will never play professional basketball.

Here is my pet peeve with the players. Please stop with the social media posts about how much you love State U, its fans, the coaches, God and your family, on your way to saying you’re kicking up your heels and looking for greener pastures. ‘… with that being said…’ is wearing the rest of us out.

If you want to leave? Just do it, but please spare us the platitudes.

Coaches

What is a coach to do? If he is winning and doesn’t move to the bigger job, he keeps larger sums of money out of his family’s future, but if he wants to be loyal and build something special, he runs the risk of staying a season or two, too long and getting canned.

When St. Peters went to the Sweet Sixteen, it was that Cinderella story of how the little school could jump up and take on the ‘Blue-Bloods’. Coach Shaheen Holloway told us stories of how gratifying it was to overcome obstacles and how his team built something special.

Of course, he was negotiating a deal with Seton Hall within minutes of being eliminated from the national tournament and his three guards were in the portal just as fast. Maybe it wasn’t as ‘special’ as we thought.

They have the right to do this and I have no complaint with them. I have just come to conclusion that college basketball is a series of one-year contracts and I should treat it as such. Gone are the days of a player loving State U and his teammates so much that he plays there four years, sets records, goes through all the highs and the lows.

‘Get yours and get out’. Sadly, I believe that is the climate of college basketball.

Whole Universities

These doors swing both ways. When Loyola left the Missouri Valley Conference, our response was that conference realignment is bad. When Belmont, UIC and Murray State joined the Valley, we decided that conference realignment is good. Except if you are the Ohio Valley Conference.

While the OVC attempts to cope with those and other losses, they have to go hunting for fresh programs. As the dominos fall into place, Little Rock leaves the Sun Belt and two Division 2 schools make the move out of the Great Lakes Valley Conference. One of those programs, Lindenwood University has only been IN in the GLVC for two years after leaving the MIAA and now it’s ‘moving on up’.

One-Year Contracts

It starts in the prep ranks and works its way up and in the NBA and works its way down. When LeBron took ‘his talents to South Beach’, it signaled a change in mentality for all to see and to be influenced by. He didn’t stay in Cleveland and build something. He took an easier and more lucrative way.

We’re told that outstanding Saint Louis University guard, Yuri Collins has entered the transfer portal mostly for the NIL money. It is clear that more money can be made while playing for programs with more basketball crazed fans and businesses.

Just a question here. When the local car dealership pays a player instead of donating to the university, how will that affect the school’s bottom line?

Outstanding prep players move from AAU to EYBl and back again. They move from the neighborhood public school to the affluent private school or perhaps their whole family picks up and moves to a different district or state all together. Is it better coaching? How about a special program? Maybe a shoe deal? Who knows? Sixteen-year-olds are already free-agents. Why should we expect them to linger at our favorite university when they are 20?

One-year contracts are what remains. So enjoy your all-conference player this year, because he’ll be playing against your team next season.

Do Good