Miami head basketball coach Jim Larrañaga shocked the college basketball world the day after Christmas when he announced his immediate resignation.
After 53 years of college coaching, forty as a head coach, “Coach L” decided it was time to step down.
In part two of our series, “The Living Legend”, we addressed the WHY of Coach L’s decision. In this edition, we break down WHAT’S WRONG with college athletics.
Jim Larrañaga is the latest longtime head basketball coach to call it quits because the game has changed so dramatically. Coach L shared his thoughts and feeling about the new challenges of coaching college basketball.
"I don't know if you remember on our run to the Final Four, people all making a big deal about the, one of the NIL deals that one of our players got and I said, yeah, but, that's going to be the new normal now and it's just going to get either better or worse depending on how you look at it.”
No Transparency…
“My thought, originally, this goes back 20 years is that these kids are students, they're not allowed to have what you would call work-study, like the normal student can come in and get a job, and my answer was we should make it like work-study. They're going to put in 20 hours a week in their sport. Let's pay them a reasonable salary, make it professional, and make it transparent. Right now, there's no transparency.”
Dishonesty Reigns…
Coach L feels the business has become dishonest, particularly when dealing with player agents. Due to NIL, coaches must now deal with agents. And those agents are not always forthcoming.
“My conversations were ridiculous, with an agent saying to me, 'Well, you can get involved if you're willing to go to $1,000,001.' And I'm like, 'What? a million dollars?' And that'd be the norm. That was the norm."
“One of the difficult things, I feel like I'm an honest guy, so if I'm talking to someone, I hope they're telling me the truth and in many situations the person would tell you something and you'd find out later, no, that's not really accurate. And you don't know. You don't know who's telling the truth. There's no transparency. If someone tells you, oh, I've been offered a million dollars, what would you offer me? You've been offered $1 million? Man, you better take that, because that's ridiculous. One million dollars to play college basketball and then you find out he was offered $100,000. When there's no transparency, there's no professionalism in the sport. It's just a pro sport now. You have to have a pro mentality and you have to have a pro system in place to deal with all of it.”
“If we're going to have agents, if we're going to be paying substantial amounts of money, then there needs to be some accountability for that.”
“That's one of the things that I felt like in these last two seasons, I'm not earning my salary. I'm supposed to be able to do a really good job because I'm being rewarded for all the previous success that I've had and hopes that that success will continue. And when I'm not able to do that, I say to myself, you need to step down. You need to step aside and let someone who is better equipped to handle this new world than I am.”
BOTTOM LINE:
NIL and the Transfer Portal have introduced agents into the game, with no transparency, no governing system, no accountability.
Changes MUST be made to save this game we love and those pillars that make it great.
GO CANES!
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