There’s one very simple thing all college sports coaches can do — football and basketball in particular — in this new world of NIL and the transfer portal.
It’s not very hard. It just requires a little patience and discipline, also an allowance for the reality that sometimes, the portal will not cut in one’s favor. Win some, lose some. That’s the nature of competition. It’s the nature of recruiting. It’s the nature of sports in general.
Coaches need to stop acting offended when a portal or NIL episode doesn’t go their way. They need to stop claiming that NIL and the portal are destroying college sports as we know it.
Stop. The world isn’t ending. Moreover, transfers often breathe life back into a roster or boost a team’s fortunes. The liberalized transfer rules enable teams to quickly recover in ways that might not have been as readily available to them in the past.
For example: Kansas coach Bill Self has talked about how bad the portal is, but Arizona State transfer Remy Martin was a central piece of Kansas’s run to the NCAA Tournament championship this year.
Stop saying everything is bad, especially when “everything” helps you win a national title.
If you win a transfer portal battle, savor it. If you lose a portal battle, don’t blame the opposing coach. Find someone else in the portal. This is how it works. Coaches make millions of dollars. If their job description is longer and more complicated, what’s the problem?
Everyone knows this is the new reality of the industry. Money from a donor base will be needed at each school to secure top players.
Obviously, coaches at mid-tier schools will find it harder to attract top talent, and NIL is just one more obstacle for them. However, let’s step back and realize that the top schools have always had the leverage. Let’s also realize that — as Sam Gilbert under John Wooden demonstrated at UCLA in the late 1960s — inducements have long been part of college sports. The main…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at Football | Trojans Wire…