The world according to Jim:
• Mick Cronin is close to becoming a regular at the top of the notes column. This time, I can’t criticize him at all. …
• The UCLA men’s basketball coach gets it, probably more than most, when it comes to the new age of college sports: Universities allowed to pay their athletes up to $20.5 million divvied up among multiple sports – consider it a salary cap – and high-profile players in the revenue sports (and their agents) using the NIL system and the transfer portal as a form of annual free agency.
This was Mick, at the start of his postgame media session after the Bruins’ impressive victory over ninth-ranked Nebraska on Tuesday night: “You should be able to go over the revenue share [cap] to be able to retain players. Very few of these guys are going to be able to retire on (NIL money), so we need to encourage guys not to transfer.” …
• He was thinking of a system similar to that of the NBA, where Bird Rights – named after Hall of Famer Larry – are part of the collective bargaining agreement, enabling teams to go over the cap to re-sign a free agent who has been with their team for multiple seasons. It would have to be tweaked for a four- or five-year college player, but maybe it would slow the transfer chaos we currently see, particularly in men’s basketball and football. …
• Then again, three of the key words in the above paragraph are “collective bargaining agreement.” I’m still convinced the only way to truly reduce the chaos is for universities and their administrators to acknowledge that their players are employees in a multi-million dollar business – one which provides lots of TV programming for Fox, ESPN and the rest, and as a result lots of revenue for the conferences and schools. (The tradeoff, as Cronin also noted Tuesday night, is weird game times on weird nights for the sole benefit of the networks.)
But the conferences and universities continue to fight employee status. Never let it be said that these are not stubborn people. …
• Consider this: How many players who transfer three or four times will wind up without a degree or unprepared for life after basketball?
“None of you guys have gotten the phone calls that I get,” Cronin said. “Okay, guys need jobs when they’re 27 and they’re done playing in Europe. … Even the guys that graduate, (it’s) hard. Because we’ve got AI coming, but they have no resume because they’ve been playing basketball.
“Now these kids aren’t gonna have degrees that are transferring three or four times. So we got to do everything we can … anything we can do to try to deter guys from moving so much that they can’t possibly graduate. Because schools aren’t going to bring you back. You’re on your third school. They’re not gonna pay for you to come back when you’re 25 (and) you only went here for a year. It’s not the same as when Earl Watson came back. I think when I was here (when) he was getting his degree.”
Fair point. The schools are paying them now, in revenue sharing money as dictated by the House v. NCAA settlement. Down the line, do they really have an obligation to a former player who was just passing through, as opposed to a guy like Watson who played four years for Steve Lavin at UCLA? (Then again, Watson – who had gone on to an NBA playing and coaching career – paid for a large portion of the tuition and fees to get his degree.) …
• How bad is it: Isaac Trotter, a national college basketball writer for 24/7 Sports and CBS Sports, posted this on The Platform Formerly Known As Twitter: “There are only 22 high-major scholarship players who will celebrate Senior Night this week, having played at just one place. Mississippi State’s Shawn Jones Jr. is the only SEC senior to finish where he started.”
That was accompanied by a chart: The Big Ten had 10 seniors who stayed, the Big 12 had five, and the Big East and ACC had three apiece. Clearly, Senior Night isn’t what it used to be. …
• The portal and NIL might be the biggest factors, but coaching changes have had an outsized effect, as well. And let’s just say I’ve heard more than one college coach utter the word “tampering.” …
• Another antidote to school-hopping? Enforceable, ironclad signed contracts – you know, the type that an employee signs – would help. So, too, might a return to the rule that a player who transfers must sit out a redshirt year, though it’s almost a given that would be challenged in court. …
• But here’s the other dilemma: Who’s in charge? The NCAA has given up, and the College Sports Commission, supposedly in charge of enforcing the current rules and limits, seems toothless. …
• Angel fans have made their feelings known – and might continue to do so over the next couple of days – in response to Arte Moreno’s statements of a couple of weeks ago – i.e., winning as a lower priority – and my own opinion of those statements printed this week. Look for at least one column of those responses next week, and given the volume of reaction there’s a good chance there will be two. …
• Which leads us to this week’s quiz: When did the Angels last win a postseason game, and who was the winning pitcher? As a bonus, who drove in the go-ahead run? Answer below. …
• The Kings’ firing of Jim Hiller as coach last Sunday morning not only had been coming for a while, but the beginning of the end might have actually been last spring and that failed challenge of Edmonton’s tying goal in Game 3 of their first-round playoff series.
It led to a go-ahead power play goal, and the Kings – who had earned home-ice advantage in their fourth crack at the Oilers in the playoffs in four years and had taken a 2-0 series lead in L.A., were doomed and didn’t know it yet. They lost that series in six, the malaise has bled into this season, and now interim coach D.J. Smith has to pick up and reassemble the pieces. …
• Quiz answer: The Angels’ last victory in a postseason game was Oct. 22, 2009, a 7-6 win against the New York Yankees at Angel Stadium in Game 5 of the AL Championship Series. Kevin Jepsen was the winning pitcher, Brian Fuentes got the save and the Angels rallied from a 6-4 deficit with three runs in the seventh on an RBI grounder by Bobby Abreu and RBI singles by Vladimir Guerrero Sr. and Kendrys Morales, the last of which broke a 6-6 tie. The Yankees won Game 6 in the Bronx and went on to win their most recent World Series championship. …
• Which means the 16 seasons since have been interminably long for both Angels and Yankees fans, for different reasons. …
• And a hint to the reason why in one of those cases was this byplay in the aftermath of World Series Game 5 in 2024, when I was leaving Yankee Stadium around 2 in the morning after fighting Pacific time zone deadlines and mentioned to a security guard that a couple thousand Dodger fans were still celebrating in the stands and on the field.
“Well, we still have 27 of them,” he said, meaning Yankees championships. I didn’t have the heart to respond with the words “ancient history.”
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