He makes some good points, though I think few people will be convinced.
This is from his free substack email, so I'm sure he won't mind me posting it here.
NIL and the transfer portal has made college hoops better than ever
Don't let Grandpa Simpson and his ilk tell you different
The obituary on the 2025 Kansas season was an interesting one. The Jayhawks’ season was generally viewed as a massive disappointment because they were the preseason AP #1. In hindsight, it’s curious how so many people covering the game took a look at Kansas’s roster and agreed that it was the best in the land. Kansas reportedly spent heavily for its roster and clearly underperformed in that context. But the story of Kansas’s demise isn’t that they underperformed given the expectations placed on them, it’s that every single person covering the sport whiffed on their evaluation of the Jayhawks.
That’s one example of how this season was as unpredictable as ever based on the AP preseason rankings. It’s fashionable to think that this year’s top-heavy season and eventually, top-heavy tournament was the inevitable result of NIL and transferring freedom. But I’m skeptical that’s the case, partly because at the beginning of the season, nobody saw this coming. This year’s Final Four teams got a combined four #1 votes (all to Houston) in the preseason poll. Michigan State won the Big Ten (at 17-3) - and wasn’t ranked in the preseason. St. John’s won the Big East (at 18-2) - and wasn’t ranked in the preseason. Duke won the ACC and was the pre-tournament favorite to win the title - and didn’t get a single #1 or #2 vote in the preseason poll.
And it’s not like this was the first time we had the top seeds monopolize the later rounds of the tournament. The other time four one-seeds made it to the Final Four was 2008, well before NIL was a thing. That season was a little different in that those teams were all ranked in the preseason top four. All 72 of the first-place votes went to one of those four teams. People saw it coming then. If you wanted to say that season was chalky and predictable, nobody could have argued.
That occurred one year after the chalkiest Elite Eight in history: all four 1’s and three 2-seeds made it along with a 3-seed in 2007. The NBA increased its age limit to enter the draft in 2006. You can see the connection. Surely, this was the beginning of the end for parity in college hoops. The best teams were going the get all of the future NBA stars going forward.
And in 2009, for the third consecutive season, the Elite Eight featured all four 1’s (along with two 2’s and two 3’s). The death of parity was upon us. But in 2010, two 5-seeds made the Final Four. In the Sweet 16, Northern Iowa beat a seemingly loaded Kansas team, and Cornell beat Wisconsin. Butler took Duke to the final possession of the championship game. In 2011, 8-seed Butler and 11-seed VCU met in a Final Four game. Alas, the reign of chalk was merely temporary. A long era of relative tournament chaos was beginning.
Between the 2009 tournament and this year’s tournament, there was just one case of all four one-seeds making the Elite Eight. And while people seem to think NIL just became a thing this year, it was legal beginning with the 2021-22 season. That year, a 15-seed made the Elite Eight. In 2023, a 16 beat a 1. San Diego State played Florida Atlantic in the Final Four. Last year, Oakland beat Kentucky. 11-seeded NC State team beat Duke (kind of easily) to get to the Final Four. D.J. Burns, currently averaging 10 points a game for the Goyang Sono Skygunners was a national sensation.
But the date that NIL was legalized is a bit of a strawman. Sources tell me that prior to that time, players (or people very close to them) may have received benefits for signing with a team. Even if you want to believe that everyone followed NCAA rules regarding impermissible benefits in the pre-NIL era, there was always a massive difference in basketball budgets from the power conference to the mid-majors. Programs could pour as much money into their practice facilities, arenas, coaching staff, and travel arrangements as they wanted. Sources tell me this influenced players on where to play.
So it’s a bit premature to think that NIL is ushering in an era of superteams where upsets will disappear from the tournament. This season only fits the narrative if you ignore the complete failure to predict any of this back in November. As with the late-aughts, this figures to be temporary.
But Ken, you say, it’s not just NIL, it’s the transfer portal. The problem with that is that permissive transfer rules have been around for a while. And it wasn’t until this year that the top of college basketball got stronger than ever and the tournament got chalky. And the thing is, the transfer portal is awesome. It make college hoops more interesting.
Scott Van Pelt, a pretty reasonable media-type, complained this season that all of the player movement is bad for the sport. That it’s universal free agency every season, and no professional sports league works this way. That part is true, although it’s hard to see any negative impact on the interest in the sport, and certainly not in the quality of play. But setting that aside, let’s do an honest comparison of the professional and college restrictions on player movement.
College
- Players are free to change teams each offseason
- Players are NOT free to change teams in the middle of the season
Professional
- Players can sign multiyear contracts
- Players can demand trades against the team’s will (even in the middle of the season)
- Players can be traded to a different team against their own will (even in the middle of the season)
- Players can agree to contract buyouts to change teams (in the middle of the season)
- Players can be released (even in the middle of the season)
So yeah it’s not the same. Universal free agency is unique, but it’s dishonest to leave out that college is different from the pros in that there are no in-season roster changes, either. And the trade of universal free agency for complete in-season loyalty is worth it. (I’d also add that universal free agency makes the first month of the offseason absolutely riveting in a way it never was before.)
Every team still has total incentive to win once the season starts. That’s always going to be the basis for what makes the college system different from the professional one. Everyone on the team knows they won’t be on a different team before the end of the season and everyone in the organization is all-in to win now. Every team has free reign to build a roster every season. There is no need for a multi-year rebuild anymore. If you see that as a bad thing, you just like to see bad things.
And even with universal free agency, the amount of player movement among rotation players on the Final Four teams this year is roughly in line with the player movement on the four conference finalists in the NBA playoffs last year. The top eight rotation players on each team played a total of 100 seasons, and there were 16 team changes among them (16.0%). For the NBA’s final four, there were 138 seasons among the top eight players on each team, with a total of 22 team changes (15.9%).¹
Of course, for teams with smaller budgets, player movement is more frequent. But this is no different than the professional game. Not everybody is Udonis Haslem. Take D.J. Burns’ current teammate and my former personal obsession, Alan Williams. Williams has played ten seasons of professional basketball and has played for seven different teams. Pick your favorite college player from the past two decades who didn’t get drafted, head to realgm.com, and you’ll probably see a guy who is changing teams nearly every season.² Often mid-season!
Naturally, the teams with the most resources will have an advantage in a world like this. But (a) they had an advantage in the old world and (b) as Kansas proved, you can spend a bunch of money and fool the entire country into thinking you did the best job building a roster, only to result in a first-round exit. It hardly seems like a reason to declare the sport is headed for doom.
It’s just the opposite I’d say. The last three preseason #1’s have won a total of one tournament game. A team can lose 19 games in a row one season and get a 6-seed the next season. Or a team can make the Final Four one season and then not qualify for its conference tournament the next. Down is up, up is down. Anything is possible and people are increasingly bad at predicting it. That’s a feature not a bug. It’s the heyday for college hoops.
In fact, in 15 years if you happen upon a group of fans in their twenties, you should suggest that we go back to the time when players had to sit out a year in order to change teams, and the coaches got all the money. You’ll get laughed out of the room.
1
For the college players, I ignored freshmen in this tally since obviously they haven’t had a offseason to possibly change teams. For the NBA players, I only used a maximum of a five-year window for each player and likewise ignored rookies.
2
Mine are Josh Adams (11 teams in 8 years) and Malcolm Delaney (7 teams in 9 years).