The Providence Crier

Leadership is apparently hard to come by in college sports, and the head coaches and prominent AD’s of universities are looking for somebody to step up and provide some guardrails around college sports. Well, here I am!

As a fun thought exercise, I provided ideas to create some stability within college basketball and fix the sport that I so love. The college basketball I grew up with is dead and gone, but I’m not willing to just accept that. I’m a traditionalist at heart and know a lot of what I’m proposing below is fantasy, but I do think the intent is that each of these changes would be best for the long term future of the sport. These are rule changes that can be made that preserve some of the history of college basketball while ushering in the new era of player empowerment and modern college sports.

Without further ado, if I was named the fearless leader of college basketball, here are some rules I would implement Day 1:

• Schools acquiring a transfer portal player have to pay a “finder’s fee” to the school the player is departing from: Not only would this lead to less player departures year over year, schools would stop poaching players in the middle of the season (it’s tampering, let’s call it what it is). This would also give some financial stability to these smaller schools who develop players only for them to depart for more “prestigious” schools once they find some modicum of success. I hate seeing these smaller schools do a terrific job of evaluating prep talent out of high school only for that player to leave after one outstanding year. These schools are essentially being punished for out-scouting and out-evaluating the bigger schools, and this rule change hopefully would alleviate some of the pain of losing those players. I’m not sure exactly what this fee would/should be, but it’d be a percentage of what the player is making that upcoming year from the new school. Schools pay buy-outs when hiring coaches. Why not the same for players?
• There is a strict salary cap in college basketball – let’s call it $5 million – and every team has the ability to pay their roster up to that $5m pool: This will even the playing field and disallow a team like a Kentucky or St. John’s from spending 3-5x more than the rest of their counterparts. It would create more parity in college basketball. Additionally, it still allows the players to get paid, but not at an egregious amount like we are currently seeing. The pendulum has swung too far in the direction of player empowerment, and I’m hopeful this rule appeases both the administration in providing roster stability while also allowing players to still make money off their name, image, and likeness.
• Players have to sit out a year if they transfer, unless they have graduated and received their degree. If they have their degree, they can then transfer without sitting a year, rewarding players who get their degrees. The only exception would be if a coach leaves for another program or is fired: The current ability to play for 4 schools in 4 years needs to end. How are these players staying eligible? What happened to the premise of a student-athlete? This will incentivize the athletes to work towards what the whole point of going to college is for: to get your degree. It also incentivizes players to get their degree so they have more college flexibility post degree. The coaches and schools would love this as they don’t have to re-recruit every player on their roster every offseason. Having to recruit all 13 scholarship players every offseason is forcing college coaching legends to retire or look towards the pros, as it’s just too exhausting re-recruiting every player every season. It’s not sustainable for the long term and creates burnout too quickly.
• There is a Commissioner for college basketball: Similar to Roger Goodell in the NFL or Adam Silver in the NBA, this person oversees the entire sport. He has no conference affiliations and makes decisions based off what is in the best interest of the sport. The NCAA is a bureaucratic glut currently that doesn’t have the bandwidth to properly oversee college basketball.
• No transferring within the same conference allowed: This rule would likely never get passed, but it would build camaraderie within the conference and with the coaches in each conference. Right now you can’t even trust your coaching colleagues in the same conference. It’s a sad state of affairs.
• Implement the 5 for 5 Rule: The days of 25 year old college athletes would be gone. I don’t need to see anymore late 20 year olds playing their seventh year of college at their fourth school. Every player has 5 years of eligibility after high school with no exceptions. There will be no more medical redshirts to preserve a year if a player gets hurt or situations where a school withholds a player from playing a certain amount of games to preserve eligibility for said year. This leads to less ambiguity and subjective decision making on player eligibility that we’ve come to know all too well with the NCAA.
• NCAA Selection Sunday has objective metrics so all teams know what they have to do to qualify for the NCAA Tournament: The NCAA Tournament Selection process is an absolute mess and open to subjectivity and backroom shady dealings. See North Carolina two years ago. The remedy is to provide a transparent methodology that all teams can leverage to put themselves in the best position to attain an NCAA tournament bid. An example would be something like a points system where the teams with the most NCAA “points” qualify over others. For example, 25% of the points are based on metrics (KenPom, Haslametrics, etc.), 25% are based on number of Q1-Q2 wins, 25% are based on number of Q3-Q4 losses, and 25% can be determined by a committee of humans not associated with any conferences. By doing this, you have a blended quantitative and qualitative approach to picking teams that clearly lay out why a team secured a bid in the NCAA tournament and why a team was left out. No more confusion.
• Any player that enters the NBA draft is ineligible to return to college basketball: There is a risk to entering the NBA draft. If a player still has eligibility, there needs to be a well thought decision on deciding to enter the professionals or stay in college further. Players should lean towards staying in college unless they are a locked in first round pick, especially with NIL readily accepted. This rule would provide roster stability in college basketball, which I think everybody is a proponent of.
• Any international players that play in professional leagues, semi-pro leagues, etc. are ineligible to play college basketball: This eliminates the 25 year old international player who has never played in the NBA and is now eligible to play college basketball. It’s absurd and needs to be remedied. International players have to choose at 18 just like the domestic high school kids on whether they want to play college basketball or not. There’s a window of opportunity that closes once a player reaches a certain age.
• Players can enter the NBA right out of high school. If they don’t go this route, they must wait 3 years until being eligible again for the NBA: This is probably my archaic thinking, but it should mimic college football where you have to wait 3 years before declaring. This allows the student-athlete to attain their degree in 3 years, which is feasible when you consider taking classes over summer and winter break. This also eliminates drastic roster turnover as well, which I’m sure you can sense is a theme of my rule changes.

Let me know what you think. A lot of these rules would never be passed because I think there is a subset of leadership in college sports that want to “Professionalize” College Sports.

You can’t put toothpaste back in the tube, but I do think a lot of these changes would be best for the sport as a whole.