By Maxwell Brucks
As one of the chalkiest tournaments of all-time wraps up, in which all four one seeds made the final four for just the second time in tournament history, many questions are being raised on if the transfer portal and NIL are to blame. When NIL (Name-Image-Likeness) was first passed in July of 2021, it was meant to be for players to make money off jerseys or ads. Instead, it has turned amateur sports into a lite version of the pro sports landscape. These two things aren’t killing college sports, but they are killing a lot of connections the fans have with the sports. The NCAA men’s March Madness tournament just had one of the best final fours ever, with three electric games. The product at the top is getting much better, as the teams in this year’s final four were some of the best college teams of all time, according to many metrics. There are a lot of mixed feelings about the transfer portal, so I asked college sports fan Brady Kaplan gave his opinion. He said, “I think the portal is a good and bad thing, good because exit allows those lower d1 players to go play for a big d1 school (KU, duke, Kentucky, Houston, etc.), bad because it’s harder to establish and maintain a culture through the program when you are constantly having players come and go every season.”
Mid-major schools are the ones getting hurt the most by this new age of college sports. These schools struggle to retain their talent, which hurts what makes college sports special. College sports are great, watching the players on your team grow and that’s not there anymore. College sports, in a nutshell, have become unbelievably close to the international soccer structure. Brady Kaplan was asked about this new age of college sports and said, “I think the new age of college athletics is effecting the lower tier d1 schools because these days how you’re going to get good players is by how much money you have to pay those players and the lower tier d1 schools tend not to have that much money to spend, so they are going out and getting the local kids that aren’t on the top tier because they can’t pay the top tier players” Money is becoming one of the biggest factors and it’s hurting these smaller schools who, even if they successfully scout a local player, that player can just leave their first school without any issues. The new system currently favors the bigger schools with more money to throw around, and that is the part that is hurting college sports.
