A collection of my latest writing.
Fran Brown and the Issue of NIL
SYRACUSE, N.Y. – Orange fans fell in love with the 2024 Syracuse football team. Now, they are feeling the pain. It’s one thing for your top players to make the leap from Saturday to Sunday, and another thing altogether to lose your top stars to the transfer portal.
Cash is king in college sports—it always has been—and now players are getting their piece of the pie. Marcellus Barnes, Maarad Watson, and Trebor Pena are just some of the names leaving Syracuse.
If you’re feeling a pain in your chest, you aren’t alone. This may be a new feeling for college football fans, but it’s not a new feeling altogether. Make no mistake: the Orange just got dumped, and if they can’t pony up the money to keep their star players, then one day they won’t be able to pay Fran Brown either.
Brown has said he wants to win a national championship in Syracuse, but he wouldn’t be the first coach to leave because he was more invested in winning than the school was. Just ask newly named Villanova Men’s Basketball Coach Kevin Willard. Different sport, same issue: less money, more problems.
Barnes and Watson are heading to the Lone Star State to play for the SMU Mustangs and Texas Longhorns, respectively.
Watson, a freshman All-American defensive tackle, is a star in the making, and someday he will be playing on Sunday.
During an appearance on The Jim Rome Show, Brown said, “When he told me the number they were going to give him, ask him who told him to leave. Why are you talking to me? Hang up this phone and call them to tell them you’re coming.”
Brown is a player’s coach in a college football landscape populated by far pettier men than him. This is the new reality, and with the House v. NCAA settlement in legal limbo over proposed roster limits, it is almost certainly here to stay.
That’s the reality here, that’s the mentality here, and one must credit Brown for hitting the transfer portal just as aggressively as coaches like Texas’s Steve Sarkisian.
But Brown doesn’t have the money to raid Texas, so he’s raiding programs like Marshall for Watson’s replacement, Chris Thomas Jr. He’s raiding South Dakota State, a perennial FCS powerhouse, for potential diamonds in the rough like linebacker Gary Bryant.
Bryant wouldn’t be the first FCS linebacker to make the leap to FBS football and thrive. Former UC Davis Aggies transfer Teddye Buchanan will most likely hear his name called on Day Three of the NFL Draft, but the California Golden Bears will get a piece of the glory that comes along with it.
Maybe that’s why the Jackrabbits 404’d Bryant’s page on the SDSU website.
Meanwhile, Trebor Pena—whose rise to stardom began when Brown brought Kyle McCord to Syracuse—is set to visit Miami of Florida, the same school that blew a 21-point lead to Syracuse to fall out of the College Football Playoffs.
Hurricanes head coach Mario Cristobal has been busy this offseason. The U paid Carson Beck a reported $4 million to replace Cam Ward, but Beck isn’t Ward, and he’s not McCord either.
If Pena goes to Miami, you best believe Fran Brown will get his guys fired up and upset Miami yet again. But the irony is that Brown is doing the same thing to smaller schools, and fans celebrate when he is successful.
Make no mistake: Brown’s next-man-up mentality will pay dividends this season. The Orange will open Week Zero against a Tennessee team that will have former Appalachian State quarterback turned UCLA transfer Joey Aguilar under center.
Aguilar transferred from UCLA to Tennessee after Nico Iamaleava transferred from the Vols to the Bruins. Aguilar never played a snap for the Bruins, but Iamaleava will.
Will Rickie Collins follow in their footsteps after Brown brought in Notre Dame transfer Steve Angeli to compete for the starting job? Doubtful. Collins’s young career has been marred by injuries, and chances are that both quarterbacks will win games for the Cuse next season.
Syracuse will beat the odds this year, and when they do, will Fran Brown be the next one out the door?
The GOAT
On March 2, 1962, Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 points in a single game. Chamberlain also claimed to have slept with over 20,000 women in his life.
Neither of those numbers seems particularly realistic, but at the very least, the former is true.
The latter is a matter of scholarly debate. There’s even a book about it, Wilt: Larger Than Life. Now is the entire book really devoted to that claim? No. Should it be? Maybe.
Fast forward to January 22, 2006, Kobe Bryant drops 81 for the Los Angeles Lakers. Both players led their respective teams to victory. The Black Mamba defeated the Toronto Raptors 122-104. Chamberlain’s Philadelphia Warriors defeated — surprise, surprise — the New York Knicks 169-147.
Chamberlain played a full 48 minutes, Bryant *only* played 42. Chamberlain scored 100 points nearly two decades before the NBA added a 3-point line. Bryant’s birth predates the NBA three ball by a year.
Both men are NBA Hall of Famers, both of them are arguably the greatest of their time, but the leagues they played in, and the way the game was played during their eras was fundamentally different.
So, who was better? Who is the greatest of all time? It’s a matter of perspective.
When Chamberlain retired, there were 11 teams left in the NBA, there were 29 by the time Bryant was drafted.
Thats not even accounting for the introduction of the NBA salary cap in 1984.
Bryant won five rings, three of them with Shaquille O’Neil, and two of them with Pau Gasol riding shotgun.
Chamberlain won one ring in an era dominated by Bill Russell, who had a ring for every finger with one to spare by the end of his 13 year career with the Boston Celtics. Russell won another two championships as a coach.
That’s University of San Fransisco legend Bill Russell, who won two NCAA championships for the Dons over 60 years before the school hired former head coach Todd Golden, who just led the Florida Gators to a national title.
That’s history. The same way Louisville’s vacated 2013 National Championship is history. The same one that sent Rick Pitino into exile, forcing him to coach in Greece and Iona before he was hired by the St. John’s Red Storm.
Perhaps one day, the NCAA will reverse its decision. Perhaps not. But this conversation is bigger than Chamberlain or Bryant. It’s even bigger than that Michael Jordan guy who won a title at UNC, six championships with the Bulls, and took two years off between title runs in the 90s to play minor league baseball.
It transcends the 1995-96 Bulls winning 72 games or the 2015-16 Golden State Warriors winning 73 games. The same Warriors who left Philadelphia for San Fran in 62’, moved to Oakland in 71’, and back to the Golden Gate City by 2019.
Never mind the fact that the 96’ Bulls defeated the Seattle Supersonics in six games while the 16’ Warriors lost to LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers in seven games.
After all, Jordan was racking up wins after the NBA added five teams in seven years. After all, Jordan won a title against a team that left the Emerald City behind for Oklahoma.
There are Boston Celtics fans and Los Angeles Lakers fans who will argue that Magic Johnson and Larry Bird would be on top of the NBA pantheon if not for the two-meeting year after year in the Finals. That’s a whole other conversation
So, what is James’s place in NBA history? A star who bypassed the college ranks like Bryant but has been criticized for playing for three different NBA franchises. James has more finals losses than wins, but there is something to be said for always being in it.
Steph Curry entered the chat with four titles, all with one team, but the Warriors maestro won it all from behind the arc, and some old timers don’t like that either.
Curry isn’t immune from the super team allegations that James faced in Miami. Golden State went out and got Kevin Durant after the 2016 finals. KD won two titles with the Warriors then zero with the Nets and Suns. By summertime, KD will be on his fourth team in a decade.
The one constant in life is change. Every generation has had their greatest of all time, let this generation choose theirs.
Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game
On Monday, the Florida Gators won their third national championship and first since 2008. The transfer portal had been open since late March. Fans, coaches, and writers are understandably annoyed about that. No serious or credible person believes the portal should open before the end of the season, but some serious writers would argue that the transfer portal should be severely regulated. Some of them think it shouldn’t exist at all. I have two words for those writers.
Cry harder.
Nobody batted an eye when Dusty May left Florida Atlantic to take the Michigan job. Why should former Owls guard turned Gators national champion Alijah Martin be bound to stay at FAU and play for a new coach?
You’re right to laugh. It’s a stupid question.
The reigning national champions had zero top-100 recruits on the roster. Walter Clayton, the Most Outstanding, is a former zero-star recruit Walter Clayton Jr., and the Gators transfer portal class was ranked 35th in the country by 247 sports.
Clayton spent two years at Iona playing for Rick Pitino. Why should Clayton be forced to stay with the Gael’s because he wasn’t a top recruit as a teenager?
College athletes aren’t amateurs, they never have been.
Just ask Reggie Bush.
J.T. Toppin is reportedly getting $4 million from Texas Tech to forgo the NBA draft and stay with the Red Raiders for his junior season. He’s earned every dollar, and he wouldn’t have gotten that money if he had stayed at New Mexico.
As Wu-Tang said in 1993, Cash rules everything around me, get the money.
Tennessee Volunteers quarterback Nico Iamalaeva was born over ten years after C.R.E.A.M dropped, and he wasn’t at Vols practice on Friday over an NIL dispute.
Does he hit the transfer portal if his demands aren’t met?
I can’t tell you what is going to happen in rocky top, but I can tell you that it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the ability to transfer allows them to maximize their earnings.
The Gators wouldn’t be where they are if not for the transfer portal. I’m sure there are sports writers and fans at blue blood basketball like Duke who would be shaking their fist if they read this. Fans that ignore the fact that Duke uses the transfer portal just like everyone else.
Why? Because couldn’t beat L.J. Cryer and the Houston Cougars. Cryer won a national championship at Baylor, he wouldn’t have sniffed the elite eight this year if he had stayed with the Bears. His dreams of winning a second died after a picture-perfect block by Walter Clayton Jr.
Ten teams are going to have an NIL budget of $10 million or more next season. The transfer portal is a business, and now these players are using it to leverage their skills to make money.
This isn’t about the integrity of the game, it’s about winning. And the team’s that aren’t spending enough money, that aren’t winning, hate the transfer portal.
There are some fans, some writers, and maybe even some coaches that think these athletes don’t deserve to get paid. There are mid-majors like FAU that may feel like they invested in guys like Martin who upped and left, but guess what? So did Dusty May.
There are a lot of reasons for an athlete to transfer outside of money, whether that is to secure more playing time or other personal reasons.
There are some people who worry March Madness will be less entertaining in the transfer portal era.
After all, there was less madness this March. Four one seeds advanced to the final four for the second time ever, the first since 2008, and a veteran team in Florida, coached by a 39-year-old head coach in Todd Golden, won it all.
The people who dislike the transfer portal for this don’t care about the game or the players. They believe they have somehow been cheated because these young athletes are getting paid. The whole reason we are here is for them.
If you don’t understand that, maybe college sports aren’t for you.
Turn off the TV, stop tweeting about it, and leave the rest of us alone.
I dare you to.