“They’re going to have to change something. It’s gotten out of hand …” — Jeff Judkins, former University of Utah All-American, former NBA player, former Utah assistant coach, former BYU women’s head coach
College sports is a mess. Everyone knows this — coaches, players, fans, school presidents, conference presidents — and everyone complains about it, but no one does anything to fix it.
It’s not like we’re trying to cure cancer or create cold fusion here. There are solutions to the problems created by the run-amok transfer portal and NIL, which together allow athletes to transfer repeatedly, often simply going to the highest NIL bidder, without penalty. Not even the pros have such freedom of movement.
The problem is compounded in basketball by the one-and-done players — those who play one year and then enter the NBA draft.
According to The Associated Press, since 2006, NBA lottery picks have been used to select 107 one-and-done players (those who played only one year of college ball). In the first round of the 2023 draft, 15 of the 30 picks were used to select one-and-dones. It’s bad for the NBA (for player development) and bad for the college game (the NBA’s free farm system, or at least it was).
Let’s start here: College sports is a professional league, like the NFL, and the players are professional athletes, so let’s end the pretense, abandon the fake and outdated “student-athlete” concept and proceed accordingly.
Let’s ask Jeff Judkins, who has broad experiences as a college and pro athlete and as a college assistant coach and head coach, what he would do to fix college sports.
Judkins:
“Allow a coach to protect seven players. If one of those kids wants to transfer, he can do it, but now he has to sit out a year. The smaller schools and the mid-majors are being hurt the most. They take a kid as a freshman and work with him for two years and make him into a good player, and then the big schools take him in the portal. All the work the coaches did for those one or two years goes down the drain. He loses the kid because he can’t pay him what the big schools can pay him. He has to start over, again and again.
“Sometimes coaches take a kid they don’t need as freshmen, but he’s going to develop them and play them down the road. I had a couple of players who didn’t play as freshmen who ended up being all-conference players. Nowadays, I would’ve lost them to the portal. They never would’ve developed. How can you develop a kid in one year?
“They’re going to have to treat it like the NBA. Right now, they’re just transferring from school to school. Have the players sign contracts. Have them sign a two-year contract. Create salary caps. I wasn’t against the portal — players are choosing schools as 18-year-olds. Then the coach leaves or the system doesn’t work for them. They need to be able to have the freedom to go somewhere else.
“I’ll give you an example. As a coach, I sign five freshmen, then I realize two of these five kids are not going to work out — not for me as a coach, not for them as players. My system doesn’t fit their talents or they’re having a hard time trying to run my system. They’re not going to play. That’s the kid who should be able to transfer to another school and play immediately. That’s why I like the portal.
“The hard part is when you build a team around a player or players and then they decide to go to a bigger school where they will get more money and media attention. That Final Four team we had at Utah (when he was an assistant coach under the late Rick Majerus) played together three to four years. We knew each other so well. Nowadays, either (Majerus) would’ve shipped them out or the players would’ve chosen to leave through the portal.
“College sports have lost something. It’s a loss for the athletes; it’s a loss for coaches; it’s a loss for fans.
“It’s a loss for fans because their teams are different every year. They could see a team play together for years. In my time it was Vranes, Chambers, Jonas, me and others, as well. At BYU it was Ainge and Roberts and Kite. Now those teams would be torn apart. When fans see you play for a long period of time, they think they have a relationship with you just from seeing you on the court and based on how you acted and what you did out there. You don’t have that anymore.
“It’s a loss for the players because they just don’t have the team unity and the friendships anymore. I played in the NBA for five years, and I played with a lot of good guys. But my friendships were never as close as with the guys I played with in college. When they start making money, it’s me-itis. It causes a lot of problems. It’s sad. I feel bad. College was one of the best times in my life because of the good guys I played with, and we had the support of the university, the coaches, the alumni and fans.
“Now it’s one year and you’re out. I coached several players who went to the pros and they all said it’s not the same. I told them it won’t be. It hasn’t gotten as bad in the women’s game, but it’s headed that way. It’s also hard for the other guys who don’t have a chance to go to the NBA. They are just trying to play on a team, develop chemistry and have a good college experience.”
Judkins concludes by saying, “It’s going in the wrong direction. The athletes are getting what they deserved, but it’s gone overboard.”
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