For all of about a week, it was sure nice to think that maybe, just maybe, this would finally be the year George Mason wouldn’t get raided by the transfer portal.
First it was leading scorer Kory Mincy. Okay, fine, that was expected. Then it was big man Riley Allenspach. Someone you could realistically hope to keep, but sure, if a bigger school came calling, then good for him.
Then Jahari Long left. The sixth-year senior who has already played for multiple power conference schools and couldn’t find minutes. The type of guy you just assume knows this is the place for him to be.
Nope. It’s no different than the last two offseasons, when head coach Tony Skinn has had to rebuild virtually his entire roster in Fairfax. And he’s far from the only one in the Atlantic 10 facing this dilemma.
VCU is losing Terrence Hill. Dayton is losing De’Shayne Montgomery. George Washington is losing Trey Autry, Christian Jones, and Garrett Johnson. Davidson is losing everybody. And that’s only the tip of the iceberg.
To be abundantly clear, nothing written in this post is meant in any way to disparage these student athletes, who cannot be faulted for making decisions that will advance their lives. But – less than a week after it was reported that the NCAA Tournament will likely soon expand to 76 teams – we must reckon with a dark, depressing truth. College basketball as we once knew it is dead.
Having followed this sport for more than 20 years, its greatest attribute historically is the fact that everybody has a chance to have a chance. Sure, some programs have always had better resources than others, but player development is the great equalizer. It’s how a school like Gonzaga or Butler or Wichita State could build itself into perennial national relevance, or how an undervalued recruit like Frank Kaminsky could go from barely seeing the floor as a freshman to the National Player of the Year as a senior. Programs molded young men to fit their distinct brand identity, and they accumulated long-term equity as a reward for their accomplishments, which in turn always felt earned the right way.
College basketball isn’t the NBA. There are no shortcuts to the top. There’s no free agency. There’s no trades. The players you bring in suit up for you and only you. They grow through the program, and their contributions make the name on the back of their jersey forever inseparable from the name on the front of it. Their dedication and resilience are what drive the value of their success, and their motivation isn’t the Almighty Dollar – it’s the pure love of the game. There was always a humanity to this sport that’s less pronounced in pro leagues, and that made it feel special.
That humanity has now been compromised. This year’s national champion started four players who transferred there this season. You can’t rationalize with any honesty that their title carries the same weight as a group of four-year guys who stuck it out at one school through thick and thin. Their road required less sacrifice, and the connection between those players and their school’s brand is less meaningful. If they’d been offered more money to play somewhere else, they’d be somewhere else. It’s simply not college basketball as we knew it.
None of this was ever supposed to happen. When the NCAA’s Name, Image, and Likeness branding agreement was introduced, it was supposed to be a way to compensate student athletes for revenue on endorsement deals. It wasn’t supposed to create a full-blown pay-to-play system where college kids sign semi-pro contracts with their schools, and are free agents every offseason.
And it certainly wasn’t supposed to effectively purge mid-majors out of having a fair shot to compete.
Mid-majors are the heart and soul of college basketball. When they win with their limited resources, it just means more. George Mason’s run in 2006 will forever live on as the hardest-earned Final Four appearance in NCAA Tournament history, a small school that had to beat three Hall of Fame coaches at top-tier programs in ten days. That group was no fluke – it was a legitimate top-25 squad, the type of squad you can’t exactly build when your entire roster gets gutted every spring.
Programs at the Atlantic 10 level desperately need year-to-year continuity to be able to put together a team that can reach those heights. For a school like Mason, the hope is always to build around homegrown recruits, and when they all leave, then you salvage your losses by taking chances on kids from Presbyterian and Samford with multiple years of eligibility. But then if they end up panning out, you can’t even keep them. Welcome to life as a mid-major today: Even when you win, you lose… everything.
And, no, the tournament expansion isn’t going to help the little guy either. For the one extra mid-major we’ll get every year, we’ll get seven thoroughly uninteresting power conference teams who earned nothing. Again, just like NIL and the portal, it dilutes the value of achievement.
It’s not college basketball as we knew it. This sport may as well now be a ladder rung below the NBA G-League, with upwards of 300 programs existing as feeders for the other 60. The rich have attained a level of wealth they were never supposed to attain, and after Dusty May’s immediate success at Michigan, the shift in the way top programs operate is about to reach seismic proportions. The benchmark for what’s considered “good enough” will skyrocket. Teams will feel the need to reinvent the wheel after every season that falls short of their lofty expectations. There will be less patience for coaches whose squads are consistently competitive but haven’t won big in March and April. And all of it will come at the expense of the schools who have to scrape and claw for everything they own.
It’s good for the players who get opportunities to make life-changing money that they’re more than likely not going to find in the pros. But it’s a stab in the heart to the integrity of the game. College basketball isn’t supposed to be about instant gratification and all-or-nothing visions of success. It’s supposed to be about culture. It’s supposed to be a sport where programs stay true to their identity through the highs and lows, where it’s okay if not every season is special and where the only way forward is to work with what you have.
Is the new way more efficient? Yes – at least, for the power five. But the old way was more human, for everyone. And that’s why it’s a crying shame that it’s gone.
Worse yet, it’s hard to even think of any realistic solutions. You could return to the original rule that players got one free transfer and then they had to sit. You could force high-major-to-high-major transfers to sit no matter what, which would stop schools like Michigan from buying virtual superteams overnight. Or you could institute a salary cap, which might be the best way to go at this point.
But none of that is going to bring back what has been taken from us: The magic of a sport that was all about building character, where every victory was the culmination of a hard-fought journey, where small local communities across America could take pride in young men they got to claim as theirs and only theirs. A sport where Stephen Curry once famously turned down an opportunity to transfer to Duke, saying “They didn’t want me then, and I don’t want them now.”
That was the college basketball we knew. The way it was meant to be forever. But once those big green bags got involved, they came at the cost of the human element that made the sport what it was. And for Mason, for Davidson, for VCU, for Loyola-Chicago, for Wichita State and Florida Atlantic and every other mid-major program that has ever known what it’s like to see a special group of kids’ hard work pay off, nothing will ever be the same again.
College basketball as we knew it is dead. Money killed it.