If the nine months leading up to Monday night’s national title game between the universities of Kansas and North Carolina have proven anything, it’s that college basketball and all college sports are changing.
Whoever shapes all of these changes – and it won’t necessarily be the Indianapolis-based NCAA – will help decide whether the next decade in this multi-billion-dollar ecosystem of sports, entertainment and education will transform into an efficiently run business or it will descend into chaos. Either is a possibility.
The NCAA has struggled with the rules and results of efforts to pay players, ensure gender equity, lock down the recently relaxed transfer portal, streamline an increasingly crowded infractions system and, of course, dealing with the long-debated “One and Done” rule. .
And while the governing body almost waves the white flag when it comes to understanding many of the transformative changes these issues present, there is a growing sense that this may not be a bad thing .
“Now is not the time to look at the knits and the plays,” Duke University basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski said Friday, the day before his team lost to North Carolina. sealed his retirement. “It’s time to look at everything. »
At the top of the to-do list is finding a viable system for “name, image and likeness” or NIL transactions.
Players can now earn money through sponsorship deals. It’s a huge shift in the entire college dynamic, one in which players generated millions from March Madness, but most of that money trickled down to coaches, new stadiums and weight rooms and kept the rest of the university’s athletic department functioning.
“I’m definitely happy to have some money in my pocket,” Duke guard Trevor Keels said over the weekend.
But some argue that NIL is a diversion from what really needs to happen, which is forcing schools to pay players directly for their work.
In a roundabout way, this is happening anyway, because donors and others who pump money into sports programs are now shifting some of the money to school-branded “collectives” that create opportunities for sponsorship for athletes.
The workaround seems acceptable enough for now. But the NCAA has ceded all control of it, based on state laws, school oversight and, perhaps, an eventual federal law to regulate everything.
“It has been and remains the case that we must ask Congress to help us find a single legal model” for managing NIL, NCAA President Mark Emmert said.
In the current jumble of rules, there is very little public information about who does what and who pays the bills. The concept of millions of dollars floating around without any transparency doesn’t seem like the best business model for a sport filled with athletes in their teens and early 20s.
“One of my biggest concerns isn’t even about players participating in campaigns or getting paid,” said Barbara Jones of Outshine Talent. “It’s about them giving or promising too much without even realizing it.”
Another topic is gender disparity. Congress held hearings on the issue during the tournament. Last year, the differences in how the men’s and women’s matches were handled were summed up in a video taken by Oregon’s Sedona Prince of the lame weight room at the women’s tournament.
The NCAA commissioned a task force and one group made recommendations. Most of the changes felt like window dressing. They notably added four teams to bring the women’s group to 68, moved the women’s final from Tuesday to Sunday and put the “March Madness” brand on the women’s tournament in addition to the men’s.
Meanwhile, the NCAA still holds a vastly undervalued media contract for women, the details of which paint a portrait of the NCAA as a tone-deaf bureaucracy that doesn’t change with the times. The shortcomings are all the more palpable on the 50th anniversary of the Title IX law designed to create equal opportunities for women in sports.
“I call it hot dogs for the girls and steaks for the boys,” Stanford coach Tara VanDerveer said.
Elsewhere, the new transfer rule is an attempt to rectify one of the sport’s greatest hypocrisies, namely that coaches could move to the highest bidder without any restrictions, but players did not have the same freedom. This is now the case, but when combined with NIL, it threatens to create a sort of free agency system, something many in academia would like to avoid.
The complicated and ineffective regulations have also made the NCAA appear stuck in stone.
Emmert has all but admitted that solutions aimed at establishing an independent committee do not work well. One consequence is that he arrived in New Orleans with the prospect of handing the title trophy to coach Bill Self, whose Kansas program has been marred by a complex, half-year-old investigation. decade that still threatens the future of the Jayhawks.
“It’s common knowledge,” Self said. “We’ve been dealing with some things off the field for a while.”
Like most struggling schools, Kansas’ problems center around recruiting top talent, which brings us back to the NCAA’s oldest problem: the “One and Done” rule that allows players to leave after one year. of university.
Emmert’s well-known dodge on this rule is that it’s technically part of the NBA’s collective bargaining agreement, so what should the NCAA do? But when it comes to breaking down the details and their impact on the college game, Krzyzewski said he’s had more contact with NBA Commissioner Adam Silver over the years than anyone from the NCAA office.
As Krzyzewski leaves coaching in the rearview mirror, he is struck by how many decisions are made by NCAA boards and committees that don’t address the issues at hand on a daily basis.
He would like to see a less centralized NCAA, one that would allow men’s basketball to decide its own issues, and perhaps the same with women’s hoops and all other sports.
Whether a new model looks like what Krzyzewski envisions or something else, there’s a growing sense that big changes are coming for college sports.
“Whatever you work in, or whatever you do, never remains status quo,” Self said. “We have to continue to evolve.”
