I don’t understand Epps’ path. Says he’s a Norfolk native but he played high school at Kings Fork in Suffolk and then his final year at Combine Academy in NC.
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Will be intrigued when we start getting NIL fueled super teams, with LeBron style team-up recruiting. That will be the beginning of the end….
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I wonder if the genie is already out of the bottle with this, or if there will be push to return to pre-portal transfer rules. The current system seems untenable. Too chaotic to maintain.
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Isn’t that what the blue-bloods have been doing with one and dones for a while now?
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The genie is absolutely out of the bottle. But I think curbing NIL or at least putting some rules around it will help to slow some of the excessive portal transfers. Whatever the route reform is needed the system cannot support itself for long moving in this direction.
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A few more years of 1000+ players in the portal and a lot of coaches will be waving the white flag. Something has got to give.
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Whatever happened to Efton Reid? He went to Gonzaga and barely played at all. Have to wonder if he’s been humbled by it all. No clue if we would even discuss if he enters but he has a lot of talent.
Appears that he got some bad advice along the way. But, hard to know.
Where have you been for the last 30 years of college basketball? LOL.
And even the last two years we have had NIL super teams. Suprisingly Kansas won the national title last year while having most of it’s rotation being kids ranked lower than 80 in the rankings. Kansas being under the fbi spotlight ended up being a blessing in that they had actual player development and coaching take reign.
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I don’t count say Miami as a NIL super team.
When All-Americans start transferring to play together, then we will have what I’m talking about. And I don’t think last 30 years pre-NIL are the same thing, different than OAD and under the table payments. Kentucky and Duke are the only thing that has come anywhere close and they never had all 5 all americans.
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Got it. I dont think there is that much money in NIL to create superteams any more than what we are seeing.
And just because they are an all american in their current environment means that they will be surrounded with the pieces needed to play as well or fit together. This isn’t the NBA where the the all stars are incredibly better than the average player. If that was true, then the all american would go pro rather than join a college super team
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He probably thought Timme would “retire” 2 years ago.
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I think the courts will probably blow up the system before there is any more meaningful reform. The NCAA is seeming more useless with every new court case/scandal, and I can’t help but think that they have to be close to “stuff your pockets with loot before abandoning ship” mode. Time will tell though, I guess.
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Kind of the OAD pitch that Calipari and K made the last decade. Come join your fellow elite, practice and improve against the best, ignore academics, go to Final 4s, show out on a big stage and go make 100s of millions. Rinse and repeat.
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Yeah, but the difference was that extended to maybe 20 kids/year, tops. Now it extends to, lets say 3-6 kids at every P6 school plus the top 10-20 kids in each lower conference (more in like the Mountain West, but fewer in the NEC). Its like 500-800 kids.
Fair - I guess it would be if Bacot or Timme got recruited to Kentucky or something like that…
This falls on the NCAA for dragging their feet and fighting back so long. They could have found a middle ground on player compensation and transfer rules 10+ years ago. Instead they fought every case and lost and now the courts get to decide.
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Was having this chat with @AnonymooseHoo but what could have happened if the NCAA had settled Alston after the lower court decision is an interesting alternative universe. It was really bad timing for ANY restriction or rules around NIL after Kavanaugh’s Alston concurrence (basically wagging his finger at the NCAA), and that case came out like a week or two before the NCAA’s interim NIL rules were due,
But even pre-Alston decision at the Supreme Court, I believe the AAG for Antitrust at the DOJ under Trump had written a letter to the NCAA expressing some concerns with the NIL regime the NCAA was anticipating, so maybe we would’ve wound up in the same or similar spot (very few NIL rules for fear of running afoul of AT or other laws). But there’s some precedent for statutes granting some antitrust leniency to schools that coordinate their actions, so maybe that’s where we are headed (otherwise, why hire Baker?). Who knows… The future remains hard to predict and the past remains hard to interpret, and don’t even get me started on what’s happening right now…
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Speaking of Delrahim
I will add more substantive antitrust comments later but enjoy the revolving door meets drake for now
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Drakes a musician?
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