Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Laettner criticized for his view on NIL
Christian Laettner was such an arrogant and polarizing athlete in the early 1990s ESPN produced a documentary on him entitled “I Hate Christian Laettner.”
Years later, some people are hating on the former Duke basketball star again after what he said about the current state of college athletics.
“They have to take out the NIL,” Laettner told host Mike Greenberg during a radio interview last week. “They have to wipe that out. They gotta change the transfer portal. I know everyone’s saying the horse is out of the barn, and you can’t take stuff back, but how can you establish any type of culture at a school when you’re getting new kids every year?”
I’m convinced the view about the current state of college athletics slices along generational lines. Certainly, players are going to continue to share in the revenue they produce. So, eliminating some form of Name, Image, and Likeness as the now 54-yearold Laettner suggests is out of the question. But I believe the value of a free college education scholarship athletes received have been greatly undervalued by the younger set who are fine with pay-for-play and instant eligibility for athletes who jump from team to team, often in pursuit of better deals with NIL.
In that regard, I shouldn’t have been surprised when Laettner came under heavy criticism the following day after his comments. I watched a few minutes of a show on ESPN where three people agreed Laettner was wrong and one even took a swipe at Laettner’s career by saying his style of play wouldn’t work in today’s game.
Laettner wasn’t a great player in the pros. But Laettner played 13 years in the NBA and he was a member of the “Dream Team” that won a gold medal in dominant fashion at the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona, Spain.
One of the ESPN commentators said getting rid of the NIL would rob star college athletes in their early 20s of prime earnings power. OK, then why not declare for the NBA or go overseas to make money instead of masquerading as a student-athlete and being asked to go to class?
Never mind that a college degree sets you up for the future, even for star athletes living in the moment and enjoying the adulation. It won’t last, that’s for certain.
I received an interesting response from a reader after I wrote two weeks ago that the Dartmouth men’s basketball team forming a union and, essentially, becoming school employees was a bad idea. I suggested the Dartmouth men could be fired and replaced like any other employee for poor performance, and the players were really bad at their job after finishing 6-21 on the season.
This thoughtful reader countered that unionization would be the first step to implementing a salary cap and a contract for players that would bring monetary parity to college athletics. The idea is to establish a salary cap for each sport — men’s and women’s — and allow the coaches to distribute money to the athletes as they wish. If a star quarterback, for example, gets 50% of the NIL money for football and 50% is saved for the rest of the team, then that’s the coach’s call.
Players would also be under contract with the university for one, two or even three years and contracts would be broken if a player decides to leave. This will drastically cut down on transfers, the reader suggested.
It’s an interesting take that sounds to me like the NFL, which, I guess, is the direction college football is headed. College sports has undergone massive changes, so much so that a growing number have lost interest.
“How can you establish any kind of culture at a school when you’re getting new kids every year?” Laettner said during his radio interview with Greenberg last week. “That would mean every year was like my freshman year at Duke; and you’re so much better your third, fourth year when you’re under one system, one coach, one specific defined culture. I don’t know how coaches do it in today’s game.”
Most of them don’t, Christian. They rush instead to the transfer portal and bring in a new batch of players, even if they have only one year of eligibility remaining.
Sadly, that’s the norm and there may be no turning back.