Santoro: Pack’s Alford goes viral on state of college basketball

Sports Fodder:

Steve Alford has serious concerns about the sport he loves. And he clearly believes you should have these concerns also if you, too, truly love his sport.

The Nevada Wolf Pack's men's basketball coach told us all after the Wolf Pack's 67-59 loss to the Colorado State Rams last Thursday at the Mountain West tournament in Las Vegas that his sport is broken. It is fractured and has lost its way, as well as its heart and soul.

"Five years ago, I wasn't in conversations (with recruits and their families) saying, 'How much do you want to be paid?' Alford said. "I never thought that would happen in college basketball."

The typical coach after his team had just been eliminated from its conference tournament would have spent the bulk of his time sitting behind a microphone at his postgame press conference talking about his players, his season and sowing forth meaningless cliches. Talking about the current state of college basketball would not have been a topic for discussion.

Well, Alford is not most coaches. Alford is a steward of the sport. He is the heartbeat of college basketball and has been since he captured the imagination of an entire nation in the 1980s as an Indiana Hoosiers player for coach Bobby Knight. He's been that steward of the throughout his past 35 years or so as a head coach.

Make no mistake, the things Alford said after the Pack's loss to Colorado State warning us of the evils of the current Name Image Likeness era of college sports, are on the minds of every intelligent coach in the nation. It's just that Alford is one of the few brave enough to speak about it in public while sitting behind a microphone.

That takes a bravery few coaches are allowed in this day and age.

"I've never been one that said student athletes shouldn't be paid," Alford said. "But the way it is now is ridiculous. It's utterly ridiculous. It's changed our game."

It has changed the game so much so that the term "student-athlete" is a joke and a blatant lie. Only coaches like Alford can admit such things in public.

"It used to be, 'What's my degree going to look like,'" Alford said of his recruiting conversations with athletes and their families. "'What's your relationship with the team look like? Are you a coach that dives into relationships? Are you going to care for my child?'

"You might as well throw all that stuff out because the only question they're concerned about is what they're getting paid in the portal.'"

Coaches don't speak of this publicly because most everyone in college sports is in denial about what NIL has done. They don't want their coaches to tell the public that the NIL is evil because, after all, they are constantly in the process of trying to squeeze the public out of money to give to NIL. Giving your money to NIL is pure and innocent and a lovely thing to do, they'll tell you. It's not feeding an ugly monster. You are helping student-athletes realize their dreams.

The only true student-athletes now in college are the science, math or art majors playing pickup games in the gym for the love of the game.

"Every handshake I have now before games (with opposing coaches), that (the current NIL concerns) is brought up," Alford said. "Every game me and the opposing coaches are going to talk about portal issues."

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Coaches now, Alford added, have to basically find (buy) half a roster every offseason because players fall all over themselves jumping into the transfer portal as if they are a frat party whose backyard pool is full of cheerleaders. "You're going to have to replace eight, nine guys to a roster every year," Alford said. "It makes no sense for that to be our model."

Alford has lost players such as Warren Washington, Dez Cambridge, Will Baker, Jazz Gardner, Tyler Powell, Snookey Wigington, Tylan Pope, Trey Pettigrew, Darrion Williams, Michael Folarin, Jalen Weaver, Alem Huseinovic, DeAndre Henry, Grant Sherfield, Robby Robinson, Kane Milling and Zane Meeks since he took over the Pack program in 2019-20.

Some were stars, some were valuable role-players and some weren't even known to even the most loyal Wolf Pack fans. But they all willingly jumped into the portal looking for opportunities (money, playing time) elsewhere just the same, leaving Alford to basically start over after every season.

The never-ending cycle, judging by Alford's frustration moments after his season just ended, is simply wearing coaches out. Do you think coaches like talking about NIL and the portal before games? They talk about it with each other because the rest of the time they are trapped in an environment inhabited by loyal robots who are trained to walk around and smile like the world is full of sunshine and rainbows. "Isn't NIL wonderful?" they say. "Isn't it grand that we have to keep asking our supporters for money beyond the cost of a season ticket?"

Of course not. It is awful. But if they don't do it, they won't have a job. The coaches, whose world has been turned upside down by NIL, can only truly talk about it among themselves when none of the smiling robots can hear them. So, they do it before games or on the phone with their closest friends in the profession.

"I don't know how it's going to change now that the genie is out of the bottle," said an obviously worn out and frustrated Alford at the end of another trying season. "It's a juco (a junior college, which, by its nature, has always had to recruit an entire roster every year) now. It makes no sense for that to be our model. But now it is our model."

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Alford, it is obvious, loves his sport and his profession more than most. That was clear last Thursday, and it is why he's in pain right now for his profession and his athletes.

"I've got five players now," Alford said, referring to departing players Tre Coleman, Kobe Sanders, Daniel Foster, K.J. Hymes, and Xavier DuSell, whose eligibility ran out with the loss to Colorado State. "NIL's done (for them) in two months. What happens to them? Are they going to handle the real world after having NIL for a couple years at Nevada or wherever they've been (without the easy NIL checks coming in)?"

The 60-year-old Alford has made a ton of money in his career from college basketball (and a brief fling in the NBA) and can certainly quit, go play golf or join the podcast world on YouTube whenever he wants to. He can disappear and let someone else warn the world of the evils of NIL. He certainly doesn't have to bash his head against the wall every spring and summer trying to convince a handful of 18-22-year-old athletes and their families with dollar signs (and greedy agents) dancing in their eyes that they should all come to Nevada.

But Alford, who recently told Nevada Sports Net that he will return for his seventh season at Nevada next October, isn't about to abandon the sport and his life's work just because it has gotten difficult. Yes, the ghost of his former coach Bobby Knight probably visits him in his nightmares telling him to clean up the sport before the idiots ruin it (everyone but coaches and players are the idiots). But Alford sounded the alarm after last Thursday's game clearly on his own. That's why he answered an innocuous question that most coaches would have simply answered in a few sentences with some cliches with a warning to everyone that went viral on the internet.

The thoughtful Alford, to his credit, instead took the opportunity sitting behind a microphone to try to wake up a naive and gullible nation that is blinded by all the well-worn cliches of college basketball this time of year (March Madness, the purity of sport, the love of the game and their school) that are no longer true.

Yes, it's part of Alford's job description, after all, that requires him to keep those cliches alive, so you continue to watch games on television, fill out your NCAA tournament brackets and, most of all, entice you to give part of your paycheck to your school's NIL coffers. But Alford knowingly put all of that in jeopardy because, to him, there are more important things at stake here than NIL dollars and college sports' fading cliches.

Alford knew his words, because he is Steve Alford and attached to the hip to Bobby Knight, would flood social media and the internet.  And they certainly did on Thursday night and Friday morning.

The problem, and Alford knows this as well as anyone, is that his words are likely already forgotten. One minute what you say goes viral and the next it's as if it never happened.

Most college basketball fans don't care about what Alford talked about. First of all, they don't truly care about college basketball until March and, second, they just want a team to cheer for and games to watch. They don't care how the sausage is made. They just want to eat. So, it doesn't matter to them that Alford is telling them that the college basketball sausage they are eating is filled with dangerous, harmful ingredients that are killing the sport from the inside out.

Fans, though, are just a small part of the problem. The vast majority of college athletic departments also don't truly care. They are just fundraisers void of any bravery, boldness or awareness of what is killing their own sports. Their job is to feed the problem and ask you for money, it’s not to fix anything.

Alford told us last Thursday that the problem is systemic. It is now part of the fiber of the sport. The new college basketball model, he said, is awful, a bit disgusting and ridiculous and leaves you wanting to take a shower to rid yourself of the filth. But it is the system, nonetheless, and everyone is forced to play in it even if it is a cesspool full of nuclear waste.

Nobody, certainly not the smiling fundraisers that make up athletic departments these days, the coaches who like being millionaires or athletic directors who will schmooze and slap the backs of the big-money donors down near courtside, can fix it. They've never really fixed anything that ails college sports. The problem is far too big and above their pay grade for them to worry about it.

Don't forget that these are the same people who didn't try to prevent the problem in the first place. They just stood aside and let it happen because, well, that was their job. The NCAA, in case you haven't noticed, is and always has been a fraud organization that can't tie its shoes properly, let alone fix a serious problem. It rarely even admits there is a problem. It really isn't even admitting it now, despite the cries for help from coaches like Alford.

Alford is one of the few brave ones and that's why he isn't content anymore to simply whistle in the dark through the graveyard of college basketball. He's screaming at the top of his lungs at the demons he's seeing in that graveyard and asking for help.

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Why does Alford stay at Nevada? What, exactly, is the point? What does he truly believe he can accomplish here, other than to keep collecting a safe and easy million-dollar paycheck every year under little to none of the pressure that once devoured him at places like Iowa and UCLA?

It's a fair question, a question that some of us asked when he first came here. Why would an accomplished college basketball legend whose roots were in the Midwest and had coached at basketball factories such as Iowa and UCLA even want to come to Nevada in the first place? It never made sense and, quite frankly, will never truly make sense.

Alford wasn't Eric Musselman, Trent Johnson, Mark Fox, David Carter or Jim Carey, guys who had never been a college head coach before. He wasn't Len Stevens, Sonny Allen or Jim Padgett, guys who had struggled to keep their heads above water as head coaches at places such as Washington State (Stevens), SMU (Allen) and California (Padgett) and were looking to pile up some wins and gain some stability in a less-demanding conference. The closest to Alford was Pat Foster, who was a solid head coach at Lamar and Houston before coming to Nevada, winning 276 games over 13 years and going to five NCAA and seven NIT (when the NIT was meaningful) postseason tournaments.

But Foster was not Alford. Alford was and still is college basketball royalty. He won a national championship as a player and is one of the best players in the history of the sport. He had been to 11 Division I NCAA tournaments and seven NITs (yes, when the NIT meant something) in 24 years as a head coach before coming to Nevada.

Yes, he was fired at UCLA. But he took the Nevada job less than four months after being fired and likely could have waited for a better, more prestigious offer from some other basketball factory that would now be stuffing more NIL dollars into his pockets, a decision that hopefully he hasn't regretted since he got here but nobody would blame him if he did given the current state of the sport.

But Alford took the Pack job, just the same, and has stayed so far through six interesting and successful (two NCAA Tournaments and five winning years) and the Pack should kiss his Chuck Taylors (if anybody still wears Chuck Taylors, it is Steve "Jimmy Chitwood" Alford) each day he shows up for work.

If Alford was selfish, a glory-seeker merely in pursuit of money, championships and national attention (you know, like 90 percent of all coaches), he never would have come to Nevada in the first place and followed Musselman's over-the-top, look-at-me act. But he isn't selfish. If he cared about all those wonderful look-at-me things, after all, he wouldn't have said all of the the-sky-is-falling things he said after the loss to Colorado State.

Alford, in case you somehow didn't know it before, is one of the few who truly cares about the sport. He really believes in the values the sport once taught our nation's youth and can still teach. He is, without a doubt, Steve "Jimmy Chitwood" Alford, telling the community not to fire his well-meaning, unselfish coach in a town meeting.

So, if you are a parent and an athlete who also cares about those values, you should jump at the chance to play for Alford and stop worrying about those dollar signs flashing in your eyes and all of those look-at-me things this NIL era is teaching you. There are places in college basketball, believe it or not, that still attempt to teach important life lessons through athletics. There are places where the movie Hoosiers is still more than a movie.

One of those places, as long as Alford is around, is Nevada.

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Alford and the Pack turned down a chance to play in the NIT this week, according to Nevada Sports Net.

On the surface that decision is a bit confusing and disappointing. Why not play in a postseason tournament, even if your roster is down to roughly eight healthy scholarship players? What could it hurt?

We understand that Boise State and UNLV also turned down the NIT's offer, an offer that was eventually accepted by a 15-19 San Jose State team that clearly did not deserve any sort of postseason invite. The Spartans, though, gladly jumped at the chance to play an NIT game, whether they deserved it or not.

Well, the Pack did deserve it, and they still declined.

But we get it. Alford, in case the desperate cry for help that was the post-Colorado State speech didn't clue you in, is emotionally exhausted right now. His Wolf Pack, which finished 17-16 after a promising 6-1 start, melted down for some reason after Thanksgiving and was running on fumes by season's end. It lost six of its final eight games and was obviously unable to beat an opponent that could walk, dribble and chew gum at the same time (0-11 against the top five Mountain West teams). San Jose State, by the way, was one of the teams the Pack could beat (twice, as a matter of fact) because the Spartans could only walk and chew gum at the same time and not dribble.

Alford's Pack, to make matters worse, was also battered by late-season injuries. The Colorado State loss showed us a Pack team that tried its best to compete and still had plenty of heart but was a ball of yarn the good teams in the league simply knocked when it came to winning the game. Alford, one of the most competitive players college basketball had ever seen, simply didn't have the energy to wrap yet another blindfold across his eyes and smoke yet another cigarette as another opponent loaded its rifles.

We get it. But the Pack still should have played in the NIT.

The players, especially the ones who played their final college game at Las Vegas, deserved the opportunity to play at least one more game at home in front of the home crowd. That home crowd, which supported the Pack to the tune of 8,257 tickets sold a game, also deserved another game to tell the players how much it appreciated their efforts this year.

The young players, if they don't jump into the portal, also could have benefited from at least one more game. So why not play in a game with little or no pressure after the past four pressure-packed months? It could have been fun. You remember fun, don’t you, Wolf Pack? Why not just allow everyone to simply have one more night to celebrate the program and have a fun night out.

Who cares if you lost a game in a tournament that nobody truly cares about? Nobody cares, that's who.

The Pack should have played in the NIT.