By Adam Roberts – 4/16/2021
Notre Dame head football coach Brian Kelly was on #Greeny this morning on ESPN La Crosse 105.5, and the two spent a good deal of time discussing the changes coming to college sports. Most of the discourse was over whether or not it’s avoiding a potentially challenging situation by transferring out of a university for a different opportunity, as is now allowed with the transfer portal allowing for athletes in all sports to transfer one time before graduating without having to sit out a year.
What outgoing Wisconsin athletic director Barry Alvarez is concerned with most is not the transfer portal, which he believes is a fine option for players, but with the potential for athletes to be taken advantage of by lessened restrictions on players capitalizing on name, image, and likeness. “It’s using NIL to recruit, and the school’s doing it and using it as enticement” Alvarez said on his monthly Badger Sports Network/Learfield IMG College radio show. “I think there’s gonna be rules that you have to be an enrolled student and maybe you have played a year before you can capitalize on this, but it can be workable”.
Referring back to the changes coming to the transfer portal, which now has over 3,000 football and basketball athletes within it: “It’s a coaches responsibility to build rapport with a student athlete [so] that [they] want to please the coach, [they] want to play hard for that coach, and if they’re not happy they should have a right to leave. I put that on the coach.”
The newest edition to Wisconsin men’s basketball comes via the transfer portal; Jahcobi Neath is a three-star Canadian prospect who just completed his sophomore season at Wake Forest. The 6’3″ 200 pounder saw his floor time dip from year one to two at Wake along with shot percentages.