Coaches, school presidents reaping what they sow

The headline from a Detroit news site screamed the following Tuesday: “It’s ‘disgusting’ to Tom Izzo that NCAA transfer portal is open right now.”

The Michigan State basketball coach is furious that the portal opened Monday, in the middle of March Madness, and he has plenty of company. Arkansas coach John Calipari also sounded off.

“Welcome to my world,” Calipari said. “So Monday, we’re really preparing for a game and we’re having individual meetings about, ‘Are you coming back?’ ”

I get it. The timing is terrible. But do these guys not grasp the terrible irony here?

Coaches are literally the last subset of earthly beings who should be whining about the transfer portal. Or unlimited compensation for athletes. That’s because they were the first to do both — pay players and abandon them at a moment’s notice, at the very worst times.

The portal has always been open 24/​7, 365 for football and basketball coaches. How many have ditched their players right before the postseason? How many basketball coaches did we already know were moving on before this year’s tournament began?

Welcome to my world? Who created this world? It was your brethren, Mr. Calipari. And for anyone else out there railing against what you perceive as chaos, disloyalty and greed in the NIL, transfer-portal world of college athletics, always remember this: The adults in the room brought us here.

They paved the road. They are reaping what they sowed.

Paying players? Ha. Some of the greatest programs of all time cheated by doing just that. John Wooden’s UCLA dynasty had a sugar daddy named Sam Gilbert, referred to in an explosive (and never disputed) Los Angeles Times piece as a “one-man clearinghouse” for Bruins players. Like everything else, college athletes are more expensive these days. But where did pay-for-play begin?

There will be more casualties now, although maybe schools such as Saint Francis are the lucky ones. Saint Francis dropped out of the rat race Tuesday, announcing it will drop from Division I to Division III, essentially because it’s too expensive to keep up.

The chairman of the board of trustees there, Rev. Joseph Lehman, said this: “The governance associated with intercollegiate athletics has always been complicated and is only growing in complexity based on realities like the transfer portal, pay-for-play, and other shifts that move athletics away from love of the game.”

Love of the game. Maybe the reality of high-stakes college sports didn’t trickle down to Saint Francis until now, but that quaint notion disappeared at least 60 years ago.

Calipari spoke of awkward meetings with players who might be leaving. Hmmmm. That reminds me of Ben Howland holding a season-ending meeting with his Pitt basketball players all those years ago, making it seem to them like he’d back when he already knew he was UCLA-bound.

A few years earlier, upon signing a seven-year extension at Pitt, Howland said, “I will be here for the next seven years without question.”

Hey, good for him. Good for all these guys. We’re all looking to move up in the world. It’s the American way. But again, please do not forget how we got here.

You want somebody else to blame, even before the money grubbing coaches? Blame the college presidents, who didn’t think twice about ditching decades-long partnerships and poaching schools from other conferences and wrecking historic rivalries. They didn’t think twice about putting their “student-athletes” in awful situations, either, where they’d have to travel 800 miles on a school night to play a game in a conference they made no geographic sense. All for more TV money.

Parents create the dynamics of a household, just as teachers do a classroom, coaches a locker room and bosses a workplace. College presidents were long-ago tasked with balancing academics and athletics and sold their souls to the latter. Like so many coaches — the ones they’d steal from other schools, for example — college presidents chose money at any cost, and now, quite logically, college athletes across America have followed their example.

Greed. Disloyalty. Chaos. The adults sowed it.

I’m reminded of then-Big East commissioner Mike Tranghese’s words after the Big East blew up on account of its presidents becoming jealous of a Pac-10 TV deal and wanting more, and more, and more. And pretty soon these alleged beacons of academic integrity were groveling at the altar of ESPN.

“It just seems like loyalty, integrity and congeniality are gone,” Tranghese said. “College football has taken control of everything. All these moves are about football and money and greed. I’m embarrassed about the whole thing.”

It truly is embarrassing. It always has been. But now that it’s athletes following the money, people are up in arms. Now that it’s athletes going wherever they please, whenever they please, it’s a problem.

Suddenly, all these coaches who preach “no excuses” and “play for each other” and “never quit” can’t handle the heat.

Former Virginia basketball coach Tony Bennett is a notable example. He quit in October, citing NIL and the transfer portal as reasons for his sudden departure, leaving his players without their leader less than three weeks before the season opener.

Welcome to their world.