Amateur hour: We need to fine-tune post-COVID changes in college sports
The COVID pandemic prompted numerous changes in college sports. The most significant is student eligibility and the use of the transfer portal, giving student-athletes the ability to move to another school and play immediately. The eligibility rule was further watered down in 2023, paving the way for multiple transfers. The long-standing pre-pandemic rule that transfers sit out one year was effectively dead.
Then came the mechanism for student-athletes to earn money for their participation, attracting names, images and likeness (known as NIL) endorsement deals that puts money directly into their pockets. That change effectively ended amateur status amongst student athletes — something the NCAA had protected for many decades.
Individually, the transfer portal and NIL can be viewed as reasonable changes to how student-athletes function within college sports. For revenue sports like football and basketball, and to some degree hockey and baseball, college sports serve as the de facto minor league system for professional sports leagues. Given this role, providing greater flexibility and outlets for student athlete compensation makes sense.
However, the law of unintended consequences keeps imposing itself, as student athletes look for better NIL opportunities and use the transfer portal to move to schools that give them more attractive endorsement deals. In such cases, money, not participation on the playing field, may be driving major decisions.
Such activity has created chaos among coaches who must not only recruit high school seniors but now college student athletes who enter the transfer portal. This has resulted in a turnover of rosters that coaches must address every year.
A perfect example of this is the University of Illinois men’s basketball team. In 2024, they enjoyed a run to the Elite Eight, something they had not done for nearly two decades. The coach’s “reward” for this success was a complete turnover of his roster. Every active player on this season’s team is new, creating challenges to develop chemistry on the court for teammates who have only been playing together just a few months.
So far, Brad Underwood, their coach, has managed to showcase a talent-laden team with a high ceiling, developing team chemistry on the fly rather than nurturing it over previous seasons.
Not all coaches have been as successful or so fortunate. Jim Larranaga, the now former coach of the Miami Hurricane’s men’s basketball team, decided that enough was enough, saying that the new culture of one-and-move made it impossible to build a team that could stick together. He took his team to the Final Four in 2023, only to see the majority of his roster transfer elsewhere.
Such roster chaos deprives young college athletes the opportunity to mature, as they constantly seek instant gratification and the best financial deal. Fostering patience and discipline as they learn from upper classmen and wait their turn to star on the court or field are no longer priorities.
Given that football teams have large rosters, with 85 scholarships available, the impact of constantly changing rosters is dampened, though not eliminated. Not so with basketball, with 15 scholarships available, where a rotation of seven or eight players is typical. This means that even two or three transfers, either off or onto a basketball team, can make a significant performance difference.
NIL deals are not going away anytime soon. The NCAA settlement that paved the way for student-athletes to be paid directly means that the relationship between the athletes and the schools are now transactional, not relational. Moreover, if NIL endorsements become protected information, the potential abuses are unfathomable.
What should be considered for review is the overly permissive transfer portal. Placing headwinds on transfers would go a long way in stabilizing rosters and giving student athletes more time to assess their current situation before “jumping ship” to what they perceive to be “greener pastures.”
One possibility is that NIL endorsements can only be paid if a student athlete stays two full seasons at a school. Such a vesting procedure gives students both access to NIL endorsements and the ability to transfer. This means that moving annually would be penalized with lost NIL endorsement revenue, an apparent driving force behind many transfers.
If NIL revenue is untouchable, bring back the one-year sit-out rule for transfers. This would also put some skin in the game for the students, forcing them and their family to make better informed decisions that balance money and playing time.
Changes like these would quiet the roster chaos that coaches are now facing. It would also suppress the wild west mentality that appears ubiquitous among some athletes.
Placing some guard rails around what students can do to participate is necessary. The unlimited and free transfer rule was a great experiment, but it has failed. With 20-20 hindsight, when it was implemented, a sunset date should have been set to reevaluate its impact.
Without any such safeguards, the next step may be to extricate big-revenue college athletics from campuses, giving them affiliation status that demands payment directly to the school for using their name and funding non-revenue sports (based on how revenues are generated and expenses are paid).
Professional leagues should also pony up more funds to support college sports. Private equity is already salivating over the opportunity to invest in big time college sports. Then the athletes can get what they seemingly want, and athletic department financial arm races can continue untethered by campus constraints.
Indeed, college revenue sports is a misnomer for football and basketball athletics on campuses. Let’s call them what they are: farm systems for professional leagues. Then the necessary changes can be made that shines a bright light on the situation, rather than pretending it is anything else.
Sheldon H. Jacobson, Ph.D., is a professor in computer science in the Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.