Part 3 of our Jerry Carino interview
By Colin Rajala
Trove: It really is a slippery slope. So many people forget how much is on the plate of these student athletes and that’s all before even considering their personal background and relationships and whatever may be happening with friends and family near them. When thinking about this new era of college athletics with NIL, the transfer portal and the new sit out rule in play, how do you think these mechanisms are changing the sport? What do fans need to understand in this new era of collegiate athletics?
Carino: I was having this conversation with a college coach about his roster. The coach was calling guys in the portal and the stuff they were saying to him was crazy. It was A) I want this amount of money, B) I want to play this position, C) I want this many touches D) I want the offense to run through me and this many minutes. It was just like a crazy laundry list of demands. I asked him, how did you not just say, ‘eff you’ and hang up the phone?
That's what coaches throughout the country are dealing with and I think it’s easy to blame it on NIL, but the real problem is the free transfer rule. That's the problem here because that now makes everybody a free agent every year. For example, one of the reasons Seton Hall was good last year was because Richmond, Davis and Dawes couldn't go anywhere. They had to stay otherwise they would have had to sit out a year. That doesn't mean they didn't get any NIL, of course they did, but it was doable for Seton Hall. They didn’t get held over a barrel and get extorted.
Now you’re going into open free agent negotiations annually. I think Steve, at first, was a little surprised. He has this team with every other piece and an opportunity to be really successful, like don't you want to come and be a part of something special? Don’t you want to play with these other super talented players in a high profile setting like the Big 10? The answer was still, how much are you going to pay me? How many shots am I getting?
When you think about the shots thing, it's the money now and money later. You want to get your numbers up so your valuation is high next spring. Most people don't want to play a role, for most it's not about winning, it's about me, me, me and what has really caused that more than the ability to make money is the ability to change schools every year.
I also think that its going to lead to people not graduating college. We all joke about nobody's there to go to school, but you know what, some of these guys get degrees that help them later in life. Ask Jerry Walker what the degree has done for him, ask any number of players that have gotten a degree that have used it and the difference it made. The degree is not nothing, it's important. I talked to Doug Edert last year and after transferring from St Peter's to Bryant he lost a whole year of credits. He had to attend Bryant for an additional year and that's after one transfer; there are guys that transfer two or three or four times. You can’t tell me they’re graduating; they’re not progressing toward their degree.
Now you're going to send a bunch of people out without eligibility and most of them are not going to play in the NBA and make those millions, and they're not going to have a degree to fall back on. Where's that going to get them in 10 or 15 years?
