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Sports Fodder:
The Name Image Likeness pay-for-play era, along with the Wild West, anything goes, free-for-all that is the NCAA transfer portal, according to many recent media reports, is being blamed for the death of March Madness.
There were, after all, no thrilling, heart-tugging upsets by an unknown underdog this year. All four No. 1 seeds (Duke, Houston, Auburn, Florida) are in the Final Four this weekend. The rich got richer. The poor were politely told leave the Diddy party before it really got interesting.
So, it was only natural that we've been constantly told this month that NIL and the transfer portal, the reason for all that ails the NCAA world, have destroyed college basketball once and for all. How dare they ruin the NCAA Tournament? How dare they kill Cinderella?
Relax. While it is always a good thing to warn the world of the evils of NIL and the transfer portal, your precious NCAA Tournament is alive and well. NIL and the portal don't operate out in the open that is the NCAA Tournament. They do their dirty work from April to October when nobody is looking.
NIL and the portal can't ruin the NCAA Tournament. It is foolproof, the Teflon Tournament. You can't destroy it, dent it, or stain it. We're here to remind you that March Madness' Big Dance will be the only thing still walking the earth after the nuclear bombs known as NIL and the transfer portal finally explode.
The NCAA Tournament, you see, was never really about Cinderella. Cinderella was and always will be just a fairy tale, promoted by the television networks, the deep state, Disney and the NCAA to brainwash you and give you something to feel good about as you do a deep dive into the world of sports gambling.
The Cinderella fairy tale only served to give the Alabama States, Norfolk States, Mount Saint Mary's and High Points of the world, otherwise known as tournament fodder and filler schools, a reason to be distracted on Selection Sunday so they forget they were merely being led to slaughter.
NIL and the portal didn't kill the NCAA tournament. All they've done is simply ruin the Cinderella lie once and for all. It's a bit sad but, hey, we all need to grow up someday and live in reality.
We don't need Cinderellas to mess up the NCAA Tournament. Four No. 1 seeds in the Final Four is special. The best teams and best coaches all year did what they were supposed to do this month. They showed us why they are special. What's wrong with that? It's only happened once before, when Kentucky, UCLA, North Carolina and Memphis took their No. 1 seeds to the Final Four in 2008.
Did you really enjoy watching San Diego State and Florida Atlantic meet in the Final Four two years ago? What about VCU squaring off against Butler in 2011? Remember George Mason getting smoked by Florida in the 2006 Final Four? Those games were like watching a Tuesday night game in early December.
Thankfully, we won't have to watch that this weekend.
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The true problem with NIL and the transfer portal is it has ruined the foundation of college sports.
And that includes coaching.
The internet ruined reporting, reality TV ruined acting and NIL and the portal ruined coaching because, well, nobody knows anything about those things or can even recognize them anymore. Or cares.
A mid-major coach like Nevada's Steve Alford no longer has the time to plant, nurture and grow a program. He now has to go into the forest every spring and summer and chop down fully-grown, mature trees and hope they don't have a disease that can spread to the rest of the team. And then he has to repeat the process the very next spring and summer.
The days of a Wolf Pack coach building a roster that features the likes of a Nick Fazekas, Kevinn Pinkney, Garry Hill-Thomas, Kyle Shiloh, Todd Okeson, Marcelus Kemp, Kirk Snyder, Ramon Sessions, Chad Bell, Jermaine Washington, Javale McGee, David Ellis, Mo Charlo and Demarshay Johnson and go to four consecutive NCAA Tournaments is a thing of the past. Would a Nevada team even be able to recruit a Cody and Caleb Martin, Jordan Caroline, Kendall Stephens, Josh Hall, Cameron Oliver, Marcus Marshall, Lindsey Drew, Trey Porter, Tre'Shawn Thurman and Jazz Johnson and go to three in a row?
Of course not.
Could a Nevada program even entice local high school products like Armon Johnson, Luke Babbitt and Olek Czyz to wear the silver and blue and get a Deonte Burton to come out of Southern California to join the likes of Dario Hunt, Malik Story, Brandon Fields and Jerry Evans and help carry the program for three or four years? The 2016 College Basketball Invitational champion Pack had Tyron Criswell, Marqueze Coleman, D.J. Fenner, Cam Oliver, Lindsey Drew, Eric Cooper and Marcus Marshall. That's a lot of NIL dollars right there.
Could the Wolf Pack even imagine building a roster that includes an Edgar Jones, Fly Gray, Johnny High and a Pete Padgett? What about Tony Sommers, Dannie Jones, Curtis High, Dwayne Randall and Rob Harden?
It might happen for one year. Maybe two if all the stars align perfectly. But certainly not three or four.
The hope of Wolf Pack fans and coaches moving forward is to simply catch lightning in a bottle for one year, two at best. There will always be, if they are lucky, a constant flow of lightning coming and going each spring and summer. That lightning, don’t forget, also has a tendency to burn down trees.
Why even bother putting the players' names on the back of the uniform anymore? Players don't care about the names on the front of their uniforms, so why should fans care about the names on the back?
That's what NIL and the portal have destroyed. Continuity, familiarity, loyalty, coaching. It destroys memories before they are even created.
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Mountain West basketball right now looks like a Wal Mart between the store's closing on Dec. 25 and its opening on Dec. 26.
Nevada's Nick Davidson and Justin McBride are in the portal. UNLV's Jaden Henley, Dedan Thomas, Isaiah Cottrell, Robert Whaley and James Evans are free agents. Fresno's Elijah Price and Zaon Collins can be had for the right price, as can Boise's Chris Lockett, San Diego State's Demarshay Johnson Jr., Magoon Gwath and Nick Boyd and San Jose State's Will McClendon. New Mexico's Filip Borovicanin and Tru Washington are in the portal pile while the Lobos' Donovan Dent has already jumped to UCLA. Wyoming's Oby Agbim is now with Baylor.
Think of the Mountain West now like it is your fantasy baseball or football league that doesn't allow keepers. You just get together with your buddies in August or March, down a few cold ones and devour some snacks, and have a great time. Players come and players go. No big deal. Your friends stay the same.
Well, not exactly. The coach's friends seem to change as much as their starting rosters.
UNLV, New Mexico and Colorado State will all have new basketball coaches. UNLV's Kevin Kruger was fired (replaced by Josh Pastner) while Colorado State's Niko Medved went to Minnesota and New Mexico's Richard Pitino went to Xavier. New Mexico has since hired Eric Olen from UC San Diego and Colorado State has hired Ali Farokhmanesh, a Rams assistant since 2018.
Dan Mullen is the new UNLV football coach, Matt Entz takes over at Fresno State, Jason Eck was hired at New Mexico and Bronco Mendenhall went from New Mexico to Utah State.
Head coaches, after all, invented the transfer portal. The players are now only following their lead.
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Want to know who will win the NCAA Tournament this weekend?
Well, how about Houston over Duke, Auburn over Florida and Houston over Auburn?
Full disclosure: The above picks are coming from someone who has watched roughly three minutes of the entire tournament. So, invest your money wisely.
Want an even fuller disclosure? The only thing ever interesting to yours truly when it comes to the NCAA Tournament are the head coaching matchups. And it doesn't get any more interesting than a battle between the 65-year-old Bruce Pearl (Auburn) and the 69-year-old Kelvin Sampson (Houston), two of the most underrated head coaches of the past 40 years.
Neither one has won a national championship despite winning 797 games (Sampson) and 706 games (Pearl). This is Pearl's second Final Four (the first was 2019 with Auburn where he lost by one to Virginia in the semifinals). This is Sampson's third Final Four (2002 with Oklahoma, 2021 with Houston).
Both have experienced coaching controversies, and both have returned to the top of their profession.
Sampson also has Wolf Pack ties, in a Kevin Bacon six-degrees-of-separation sort of way. It was former Wolf Pack head coach Len Stevens who gave Sampson his start in Division I coaching. Stevens hired Sampson as an assistant at Washington State for the start of the 1985-86 season (Stevens was in his third year as the Cougars head coach and discovered Sampson at Montana Tech). Stevens would leave for Nevada after two more seasons and was replaced at Washington State as head coach by Sampson. Sampson would go on to coach the Cougars to a 103-103 record in seven years before getting the Oklahoma job.
Pearl's head coaching career began at Division II Southern Indiana from 1992-2001. He was in the hinterlands of Indiana for three years with the Pack's Steve Alford, who was coaching at Division III Manchester in the same state from 1991-95. The two never faced each other on the court as lower-level head coaches, though Pearl won the D-II national title in 1995 at Southern Indiana and Alford took Manchester to the D-III title game and lost the very same year.
Duke head coach Jon Scheyer is just in his third year as head coach and is a mere 37 years old. Florida head coach Todd Golden is also just in his third year and is a mere 39. He was a Pearl assistant at Auburn for two years (2014-16). Sampson and Pearl are the Cinderella stories this weekend.
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The Oakland-Sacramento-Las Vegas Athletics, or whatever they are calling themselves these days, didn't exactly have a stellar debut this week at their new stadium in West Sacramento.
The Athletics were trounced 18-3 by the Chicago Cubs on Monday in front of a crowd of 12,192 at Sutter Health Park, the home of the Triple-A Sacramento River Cats. The Athletics pitching allowed 21 hits, 18 runs and walked 10. Seven different Cubs had two or more hits. Four drove in three or more runs. The Cubs' Carson Kelly hit for the cycle.
We do, however, predict the A's will win a game or two this season in West Sacramento. But we also predict the goofiness we saw on Monday will not completely go away.
Major league teams just should not play regular-season games in minor league ballparks. We blame the A's pitching more than Sutter Health Park for what happened on Monday, but strange things can happen in strange places. Baseball in Pacific Coast League stadiums, as Reno Aces fans know too well, rarely resembles actual baseball.
Major League Baseball, and the American League in particular, should be ashamed for allowing two of its teams to play an entire season in a minor league park. The Tampa Bay Rays are playing their season in George M. Steinbrenner Field in Tampa because a storm blew the fabric roof off their home back in October. The Rays are 3-1 with crowds of 10,046 for all four games at Steinbrenner Field though it must be noted they have merely played two glorified Triple-A teams (Pittsburgh, Colorado) so far.
This is one of the strangest seasons in major league history. It is still baffling why the A's didn't just go to Las Vegas this year and play in the Las Vegas Aviators' Triple-A field. It might have been a sound business decision to try and establish a relationship with their new fan base as soon as possible, right?
The A's, though, have never been known to make sound decisions.