Where have all the trainers gone?
Roy Williams, 70, after 33 years as UNC head coach. Mike Krzyzewski, 75, 42 according to seasons at Duke. And yesterday, Jay Wright, 60, announced that he resigns as head coach at Villanova after 21 years and two national titles with the program from its position. He led the Wildcats last March to their fourth Final Four appearance in his enduring two decades of tenure – and this news has sent shock waves in the college basketball landscape.
The old guard are mostly out now. With Syracuse’s Jim Boeheim approaching 80 and telling reporters that “there’s a plan” if he resigns what he wants to do while leaving the program in a good place, he doesn’t have much time left for this one Career – especially now that his own children have graduated. Bill Self is studied intensively by the NCAA, and God knows what sanctions could return next year for him, even though Kansas is firmly at his side. John Calipari and Tom Izzo are still there, of which the former won no championship for a decade and the latter for two decades.
But Wright’s retirement is representative of a major overhaul of college basketball at a time when its foundation is shifting and stumbling those who stand on it. With the introduction of NIL opportunities coinciding with a wide open transfer portal, the state of the sport is undoubtedly changing as student-athletes take decisions into their own hands. Maybe they weren’t ready to change with it. Maybe they wanted to take the money and the memories and the stress spare, which is accompanied by changes. No one will blame them for that anyway.
Wright was the ostensible successor to the leadership position among college coaches, and now that he’s gone, a gaping hole in the coaching ranks is widening. There are coaches who have been in the NCAA longer than Wright, but none at the annual championship schools and few with his innate leadership qualities, which have been widely praised in the past 24 hours.
As the abandonment of transfer portals changes the nature of recruitment and the landscape of the sport, and student athletes embrace their newfound power and independence, one wonders if the departure of the old guard can be seen as a positive development. As the NCAA moves into this new era, the coaches that have been around for decades could take one of two paths: holding back their program by refusing to adapt to the new reality, or the entire sport with clear direction and leadership ground the NCAA with their experience into that future.
G/O Media may receive a commission
Of course, the third option, which seems to be becoming quite popular, is to leave and let the new boys find out when the old guard are screaming to a reasonable retirement age… Not my problem!
As their longstanding systems are threatened by the controversial player autonomy, exit into retirement seems to be the logical answer.
So here’s my question: since college football coaches are the ones who are the loudest and most public about complaining so much about this new era, why isn’t there a changing of the guard in the sport too?
New challenges for traditional powerhouses
It feels like every week we hear Lane Kiffin or Nick Saban or Dabo Swinney complaining to the press about the transfer portal’s struggles and the questionable ethics of NIL money as a recruiting tool while the entire CFB recruiting is being redesigned will. They face the same challenges as many basketball coaches – in fact, with the amount of NIL funds being poured into collectives and promised to undeployed recruits, they may face an even greater challenge. So why are they staying here?
While no college sports with the football machine is comparable to men’s basketball comes in its financial profitability both for schools and for the NCAA next. The largest CFB and CBB coach contracts move both around 10-million-dollar mark, with football often proves to be a much wankelmütigere position because the limited number of games and the incredibly small playoffs more options for review by the fans Offer. As long as Wright’s Wildcats were one of 68 teams that will contest the tournament and do well in the Big East, he was set. One or two free years for a football coach at an institution that specializes in their sport – well, that’s another story.
While these changes that are openly criticized by several influential college coaches to continue to fix what keeps them there?
You could argue that many of the elite college coaches are on the younger side and not quite ready for retirement, but we have the likes of Nick Saban, Brian Kelly, and Jim Harbaugh — 70, 60, and 58, respectively. They wrote their success stories, earned their money. Why stay as the Basketball Blue Bloods go?
This can indeed answer the men themselves, but maybe I can set up some hypotheses for the lack of Exodus. The larger squad for football allow more flexibility – you lose a few people to the portal, it is not the end of the world. In basketball, two or three Guys who leave have the potential to look like a complete team makeover. The size of a college football team’s roster also allows coaches more flexibility in deciding who gets game time and practice replays, giving them at least the appearance of retaining past authority over their athletes.
And faced during football programs with zero temptations and offers from opposing teams with the most competition, they also benefit them. With these big programs, there are plenty of boosters willing to put together a collective to lure a kid onto a team, and the opportunities that are implied by simply being a part of such a football program are looking pretty good.
Soccer is also just on a whole different level. The amount of perks, resources, and facilities available at the top programs just don’t compare to what you can get as a basketball coach—even if you’re Coach K. It’s a different industry – in many ways a more volatile, but incredibly rewarding on a personal level.
Perhaps we will see in the coming years a kind of exodus. A resignation of Nick Saban would probably be the crowning indicator of such a shift, perhaps accompanied by Mack Brown from UNC and Kirk Ferentz of Iowa. It would not be the same momentum blue-blooded programs like the basketball retirements, but it could have a similar signal – perhaps one of the warning or maybe one of change.
