New rules empowering players have coaches frustrated

STORRS, Conn. — Minutes after his team won the Big East Tournament championship, Uconn coach Dan Hurley was worrying aloud about one of his freshmen being lured toward the transfer portal with name, image and likeness compensation offers from other schools.

Highly recruited forward Jaylin Stewart had just hit three key 3pointers in that win over Marquette after playing limited minutes during most of the season. Hurley said he is hoping Stewart will play a bigger role with the Huskies next year, but that means the coach might have have to do some re-recruiting even with his top-seeded team in the middle of a run at a second straight national championship.

“We’ve just pleaded with him on a daily basis,” Hurley said. “You know, that portal is calling and there’s a lot of tampering going on.”

As Hurley will attest, the job of coaching in college sports — in basketball, football and other sports — has drastically changed. Switching schools is easier than ever via the transfer portal and the lure of better NIL deals can now be a factor for athletes looking to cash in on their celebrity. That has left many coaches frustrated and some even contemplating leaving the profession.

Before the NCAA Tournament began last week, the portal opened up and the floodgate was open: Some 748 Division I men and 594 Division I women entered in just the first week, even while many teams were still playing games.

“It’s a hard time of year for everybody, players, coaches, the whole nine yards,” said Clemson coach Brad Brownell, a member of the National Association of Basketball Coaches committee working on the issue. “There’s a lot of coaches, especially at midmajor schools, whose tournaments end earlier and they were very vocal about, ‘The longer we have to wait, the harder it is for us to have to figure out what to do.’”

Alabama football coach Nick Saban, who led the Crimson Tide to six national titles in 17 seasons, said during a Capitol Hill roundtable this month that the current landscape shaped by NIL funds and loosened transfer rules contributed to his decision to retire at 72.

“All the things that I believed in for all these years, 50 years of coaching, no longer exist in college athletics,” he said. “It always was about developing players. It was always about helping people be more successful in life.”

In the new landscape, players who have disagreements with their coach, or feel they aren’t getting enough playing time, now have the option of just leaving without having to sit out a year.

Arizona women’s basketball coach Adia Barnes said she thinks that will lead to more coaches leaving the profession, though she added that she’s too young to contemplate retirement. Kailyn Gilbert, the top scorer on Barnes’ team, left the program last month, then entered the transfer portal the day it opened.

Uconn Hall of Fame women’s coach Geno Auriemma is among those who worry the changes will lead to a continued exodus of coaches, especially young ones, because he said new rules have made the job unattractive at every collegiate level.

“First of all, it’s killed the high school recruiting because why would you recruit a high school kid when you can recruit a college kid?” he said. “Second of all, it’s killed every midmajor in America who have now become junior colleges, so to speak, because as soon as they develop a good player, that player is leaving. Then at the high majors, it’s costing you money to get the kid there and it’s costing you money to keep the kid there, and it’s costing you more money to make sure they don’t leave.”