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Unintended consequences have become the cancer of college athletics.
Sometimes you have to wonder how smart are some of the people who make rules changes in collegiate athletics. Sure, they say that these changes are in the best interests of student-athletes, and they may be like NIL.
But the dates and details of how they are implemented can cause even greater problems for athletes and especially their coaching staff.
Mack Brown has had to play Whack-A-Mole with assistant coaches who began leaving right after the regular season ended and up to almost the day before spring practice began. It caused havoc with the bowl game, especially.
Brown believes coaches should not be able to start new jobs until their duties are finished for the current season they’re being paid for. If all schools had the same rules, head coaches could not force new hires to begin immediately and it wouldn’t matter.
The unintended consequences of that causes schools scrambling to fill their positions on a temporary basis, like Brown had to move up position coaches into coordinators’ roles and turn some duties over the unready aides for the Holiday Bowl.
In basketball, apparently no one thought through the NET rankings relative to sizes of conferences. The ACC has 15 basketball members, and half of them were good this season and the other half were not. So the good teams are not helped by beating bad teams but losing to bad teams really hurts. The Big 12 has only 10 schools and far less chance of having a bunch of bad teams that would affect all of their NET numbers.
The biggest faux pas was the NCAA changing the rule allowing transfers to play right away at their new schools at the same time NIL payments began with the stipulation that athletes could not be paid to play. That quickly turned into players who are transferring being offered large sums before the NIL ever came up.
Two days after the basketball portal opened, hundreds of players had already entered, and some websites covering the movement attached an arbitrary dollar figure to players’ NIL values. Now how could they ever come up with that?
You know there have been discussions with families and agents before the portal opened, or so many players wouldn’t be jumping on the first day.
It had to be one of the reasons Carolina declined an NIT bid. Hubert Davis likely knew he might lose some players and needed to scour the portal to manage his roster by recruiting transfers he wanted instead of taking up valuable time practicing for and playing meaningless games that could hurt next season’s lineup.
NCAA tourney-bound Illinois coach Brad Underwood said, “You have to stay on top of transfers at every moment because that’s essential in building a roster.”
If not, some unintended consequences may be waiting.
Featured image via Todd Melet
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Good job deflecting some of the blame from Mack to his assistant coaches!!! He’s been back at UNC for 5 years and he has a 57 percent winning percentage. Also, keep on deflecting the blame for UNC basketball mediocrity on players, NIL, transfers, etc… Our head coaches NEVER do a poor job! And Joe Biden NEVER stumbles through reading his teleprompter!!!
The combination of NIL and the portal are ruining college sports.