It’s no secret the transfer portal and player compensation have dramatically changed college sports over the last five years.
But it isn’t like those dynamics burst onto the scene, everyone adapted, and we all moved on.
These successive tsunamis have caused a reverberation across the landscape, leading to massive new issues to contend with on a seemingly never-ending basis.
The latest college football transfer portal cycle provides a recent example.
The portal “opened” for football on Jan. 2 and players could enter until Jan. 16.
But what actually happened tells a very different story.
Players around the country had visits scheduled on Jan. 2 and the days that followed. Commitments started happening immediately thereafter.
Indiana, as just one example, had eight transfer portal commits by Jan. 5, and its entire new class in place by Jan. 14. And there was nothing unique about Indiana here. It was the same story across the nation.
So what this tells you unequivocally, is the vast majority of the work to add players via the transfer portal happened during the season — long before the portal ever opened.
In a Monday story by ESPN well worth your time, Max Olson described the current situation in college football after conducting a deep dive on the topic.
“For all parties, tampering has become imperative,” Olson wrote. “Teams need to find out who will be available. Players need assurances they’ll have somewhere to go. Agents play the role of matchmaker throughout December, if not sooner.”
Tampering is not just something a few untoward schools are doing anymore. It is the new way under the current structure, and everyone is doing it.
So turning our attention to college basketball, try to imagine the scenario new IU basketball coach Darian DeVries stepped into when he was hired on March 18 of last year, just a few days after his his West Virginia team learned it was left out of the NCAA Tournament.
The college basketball transfer portal opened on March 24, and if you’ve learned anything thus far, you should know that date was nothing more than a mere formality. Conversations had been going on behind the scenes for months, and DeVries was walking into a transfer portal cycle that was largely already over.
Moreover, DeVries had just one assistant to help salvage whatever opportunities remained, no players transferring with him from West Virginia, except for his son, and no players returning from Indiana. He had to move his family to Bloomington, deal with the media, and figure out all the little nuances of his new workplace. Go land the top player in the portal? Heck, where’s the bathroom here?
If you think this is a hyperbolic retelling of what happened last March, then you should listen carefully to the words IU AD Scott Dolson used last night on the radio with Don Fischer.
“The transition in basketball, it was probably the craziest time (for DeVries last March) to ever take over a program the way the portal was, so I really commend Darian that we were able to put the roster together to at least get us through this season,” Dolson told Fischer.
If you’ve listened to Dolson give interviews, you know he handles questions with the precision of a politician. He’s not going to say anything he doesn’t want to say.
So his remark suggesting DeVries “put together a roster” to “get through the season” is loaded. And it lines up perfectly with the state of college athletics outlined above.
Of course none of this is to suggest fans should put aside their high expectations for IU basketball. This is a program in a premiere conference with more than enough resources to compete at the top of the sport. For all its recent missteps, Indiana is still an attractive basketball destination with a large fan base, great TV money and exposure, and good facilities. And it’s worth remembering multi-billionaire alumnus Mark Cuban recently said he gave his largest-ever contribution to IU Athletics — and his contributions aren’t tethered to a specific sport.
And of course Dolson knows all of this as well.
“One of the things I think it’s important for fans to know is that nobody has higher expectations for the program than myself or Darian,” Dolson said. “We want those expectations. As I talk to fans, we all want the same things.
“What Darian has done in a short time period is really put the infrastructure together so that we can get back to sustained success. Just like most recently adding (Executive Director, former Pacers VP) Ryan Carr, that was a big addition for us.”
With a full year to prepare and a full staff on point to lead Indiana into this offseason, Dolson says it’s reasonable to expect much more out of DeVries’ Hoosiers going forward.
“I think we’re really going to hit a stride and get into a rhythm now that we have a year under our belt,” he said.
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