The Josh Innes Show - NIL/Transfer Portal Craziness

Episode Date: March 26, 2025

As it relates to discussing the transfer portal, most conversations lack nuance. Over 1,000 basketball players entered the portal. I'm fine with this. Let's have a nuanced talk about the portal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, friends. What's going on? It's Josh, about 1230 on Wednesday. Hello. Glad you're there. Greetings. Salutations. The college basketball transfer portal opened, and like over a thousand players entered the transfer portal, which is really wild. It's sort of wild, I guess, but then you think about the fact that there's like 300-something teams in division one college basketball is that right like there are there 300 something there's a large number of basketball teams in division one so the number's ridiculous but it's it's it's still a gigantic number but it kind of makes sense relative to like college football where there's only like 120 or so teams and there's like a billion players on each roster so when you look at that you go okay a large number makes sense whereas if you look in basketball um you know I mean there's

300 something teams potentially so whatever why do I bring this up today I bring this up because I was watching some show and people were talking about the portal and the thing about the portal is nobody really looks at it with nuance. People only look at it with a cut-and-dry angle. And the most cut-and-dry angle I hear tends to come from people who say that these guys have a small window to make as much money as possible and it doesn't matter if they leave. They should go play as many places as they can.

They should test the portal every year and see if there's more money to be made and they should take advantage of this. That's the most cut and dry one I hear the most of. It usually comes from that side of it. The angle being that players should cash in on this and the transfer portal is good for them and they may never make this kind of money again so they may as well cash in. And it is true. There are guys who are big-time high school prospects, big-time college players, who may not even do anything at the college level. They may be the 11th guy on the bench at a particular school and can still go out and get six-figure deals. So I don't disagree with that. But there is an element of nuance that we tend to lack when we talk about the transfer portal.

And the biggest thing we ignore when talking about this is what transferring four or five times does in terms of creating people who are going to be good members of a working society. Does that make sense? What do I mean by that? There are lessons to be learned about commitment. Now, when I bring up commitment, the first thing somebody who opposes this viewpoint will say is, well, the coaches can leave whenever they want.

Yes, this is true. The coaches also can get fired very quickly. Very rarely do you hear someone sucking at basketball and the school go, nope, we're taking your scholarship away. If the coach sucks for two years at the major university, they'll get rid of him, right? So there's also that risk for a coach. Now, you're not wrong when you say that a college coach can job hop and go from place to place. Look at Will Wade. Will Wade was the coach at LSU. He was the coach at VCU before that. Went to LSU, did well, had a scandal.

They fire him. He's damaged goods. He goes to McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana. Represent Chuck! And goes and wins big, at least for their standards, and now is off to North Carolina State and is taking some players and managers with him, right? Like, that's the way it works. That kind of sucks.

So I agree that players should have the same kind of ability to move and same kind of ability to find a better situation as coaches do. That's fair. I agree with this. But they also have zero accountability for any of this. They have zero responsibility. They have zero commitment. Yes, they make a commitment to go to a university.

They're not even feigning interest in pretending like they're going there for school now, which I appreciate because it was bogus and bullshit when people would bring up the argument of, well, they're getting a college education. Most of these guys don't give a fuck about that. They're looking for a six or seven figure deal potentially at a place and they've got like seven years to maximize their income. And maybe they can set themselves a nice little nest egg in that situation because they are getting room and board. They're not having to pay rent on a place, probably not having to pay for a car because someone's probably giving it to them if they're a big enough star, right?

Giving them something to drive. So this is a good opportunity for them to just pocket as much fucking cash as they can and at least set themselves a nice little nest egg for the future. So like, at least they're not pretending like this is some major college situation. This isn't like, hey, I'm getting an education.

They don't even pretend like going to school matters because these guys go to three or four different schools over the course of seven years. So who the hell knows? But first off, let me play a couple commercials and we'll continue. All right, if you're ready to win some real cash during the basketball playoffs, you got to check out Pick 6 from DraftKings.

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The following was recorded from inside an ice plunge. Okay. All right. When a core's life is cold enough, the mountains on the can turn blue. So the next time you want a cold lager, cold filtered, cold packaged Coors Light, just wait until those glorious mountains on the can turn blue. It's easy to say that fast when you're freezing cold. But the part that nobody brings up when you get that kind of steadfast argument in favor of the

portal and that argument of course being well they have this minimal amount of time to maximize their their money so let them make the money usually they call them kids which i think is totally bullshit i believe if you're getting paid to play a sport you're a professional uh when there's like a 16 year old kid playing pro basketball over in europe he're a professional. When there's like a 16-year-old kid playing pro basketball over in Europe, he's a professional. Yes, he is whatever age he might be, but if you're a 20-year-old dude and you're getting paid to play at Auburn, I don't look at you as just some college kid scraping by eating ramen noodles. No, you got a six-figure deal. You are a paid professional, so I'm going to treat you as such. You want to be a big boy? You want to wear your big boy pants? This is where I get the most annoyed by all this because people still try to treat college athletes like they're kids and they are not. There are going to be dudes

that wrap up their college careers at like 26 years of age. Okay. They are not kids. But Josh, what about an 18 year old? Well, that 18 year old made a choice in life. And that choice was to make a shitload of money to go play basketball at Duke or Auburn or whatever sorry I don't view you as just some kid like are you fully mature no but you your parents and everybody else made this decision to put you on a campus and have you get paid a shitload of money to play basketball so I cannot view you as a kid is that fair maybe maybe not but that's how I view it I cannot like I hear this all the time like I refuse to say something negative about a college kid that college kid makes more fucking money than you you jamoke it's okay to say that a 21 year old dude making 150

200 250 thousand dollars to spend six months on campus at Ole Miss is you can criticize him. You can say whatever the fuck you want about him. But the nuance we lack in talking about the portal, particularly from the people who are in just the steadfast, go make as much money as you possibly can, is that those particular players do not learn anything about commitment. They do not learn anything about, hey, when you sign your name on the dotted line to make a commitment to somewhere, there is some sort of penalty if you go away. They don't have those penalties. You sign an NIL deal at Duke and next

year you enter the transfer portal and you play at North Carolina, no one gives a fuck. You're scot-free. There's no paperwork. There's no, well, you're going to have to pay a fine. There's no, well, you've got a non-compete. None of that. Now, part of this might just be me being a bitter person who works in a world of contracts. And if you sign a contract at a radio station tomorrow and then the dream job opens two days later, tough shit, you've signed on the dotted line and they don't have to let you out of it. or if you're a year into a three-year deal and you want to leave and go across town to work for the other radio station you can't do that right so I think what we're missing here and what we're lacking is nuance and what do I always talk about I might just start I might change the name of the podcast to just nuance or just lack of nuance or looking for nuance. And I know that nuance

isn't popular. And I know that hot takes are, and I know that definitive steadfast in your face, this is right. This is wrong is what pops and that's what people are into. And that's what gets you famous. And that's what gets you clicks. And that's what gets your videos viral. Nuance is important. And maybe this is why i'm not mr sports radio guy anymore because i try to operate in a world of nuance not all the time sometimes i'm an irrational dipshit on certain things i feel like i'm 100 right there are other things that are nuanced topics so when i turn on the radio like i'll listen to my buddy matt in baton rouge and he is one of these like i don't care how many times these guys transfer type of guys.

I don't care because they can go out and make as much money. If a coach wants to leave, he can. Then why can't the players? That's all fair and that's all true. But what are you teaching people and what are they learning when in four years, five years, when they go to the real world, it ain't like that. There's no responsibility that you have to take. You do not have to sign a contract. You do not have to be committed to somewhere for a certain number of years. Like for all those coaches that can job hop, for that coach to be able to leave

that job, there is compensation that will go to the university if he leaves. That compensation will either be paid by the coach or by the place that's now employing him. These players don't have to do that. They are living an easy life. And I think part of what we're dealing with in society, if you want to go with a societal thing here, is people live extremely easy lives. That's why on the internet, they try to create controversy and try to create drama for themselves to make their lives more difficult so they can try to compare themselves to people who had real strife 100 years ago, 50 years ago, 60 years ago, so they create bullshit strife on the internet to say, hey, I overcame this. Most people's lives are not overly difficult, at least not civil rights movements, civil war, women's suffrage difficult. It's like people all have their issues, and people have money issues,

and people have family issues. I'm not telling you they don't. What I'm telling you is people in this era try to create shit so they can post about it online and feel like they're oppressed so then they can overcome the oppression. We hear about this shit all the time, whether it's white people, black people, Asian people.

Everybody's creating some sort of oppression for them to overcome, some sort of drama, something that they can rise above, like the phoenix, right? But for the most part, young people have it relatively easy compared to, hey, guess what? The Japanese just bombed Pearl Harbor. Let's get the baseball players off the diamond to go fight in the fucking war. Like they ain't living that life and They will never have to live that life. That's great.

Good for them. Look, I'm not telling you that I grew up in some like impoverished situation. I had a pretty good childhood growing up. Parents were divorced. Dad fucked around some. I witnessed some bad shit. But by and large, I haven't had to overcome great things. And I never get on here and try to pretend to you that I have.

But when I look at how people operate now, what kind of people are you sending out into society after the vast majority of these players, by the admission of the media people who tout this rhetoric, these guys are probably never going to play professionally, many of them, and this is their best opportunity to make as much money as possible. If that's the case, what kind of people are you sending into society when they're 23, 24 years old and they've never had to really experience any strife and they're entitled and they can just bounce from place to place? In the real world, that shit don't happen. So a thousand players are in the transfer portal. Most of these guys are not going to be professional basketball players or NBA players, right? What kind of people are you sending out into society? You know what you're

going to end up with? A lot of people who are bad with money. A lot of people who have no concept of commitment. A lot of people who think, oh, I'm sick of this job today. I'll leave and I'll see you tomorrow and have no real perseverance. Now, on the other hand, you do look at the way things operate now, and I think there are things that are more difficult for kids now than when you were in the 80s. Like, people love to talk about guys like Michael Jordan and Larry Bird and how mentally tough guys like that were of a certain era. Well, Michael Jordan didn't have to operate with Twitter,

and Larry Bird didn't have to operate with Twitter. Now, we could sit here in this world and say, oh, I bet they would have handled it because they were mentally tough. I don't know, man. I don't know if Michael Jordan or Larry Bird or Magic Johnson or whomever in the 24-hour news world and Twitter world would be considered these mentally tough dudes that we consider them now. Maybe some of them would have wilted. Some of them would have melted down. Some of them would have been fighting with people on Twitter and getting fired over a fish. I don't know. I do think people have it tougher that way, but that's also that access and social media is what makes these dudes worth six figures. Like I read all these stories about college dudes, right? And about how college kids

are getting criticized by people on the internet and that people need to stop the shit there were commercials running for it because of gambling uh during the ncaa tournament about not bullying student athletes and blah blah blah sorry pal i mean look you make six figures you've played at three different fucking schools in three years you're chasing money i'll treat you like an adult because if you're 20 years old and you're changing my fucking tires over at the fucking uh oil change guess what if you fuck it up i'll treat you like an adult why can't i treat you like an adult now because but because you play college quote unquote college sports like that's that's the part that pisses me off the most is this this level of hypocrisy and there's

a delusional aspect of people who love to get on the internet and on television and on their talk shows and tell you how people are mean to college athletes and all that. And in the same breath, we'll tell you that some kid just left his fourth fucking school to sign another six-figure NIL deal

and should still be treated like he's Harry High School that just got on campus and is majoring in kinesiology. It ain't the same. You can't be fucking hypocrites about it. But that's one of the things that pisses me off the most is the level of hypocrisy that we get in that. But again, there's nuance. I'm all good with people getting paid. Like I see the number of people in the transfer portal and it's kind of a jarring number, but it is what it is. Transfer, go do whatever. But also understand

that the fans aren't going to have much of a commitment to you you don't have much of a commitment to the university you're vagabonds you're you're you're people that bounce from place to place you're hired guns fine but as it becomes more of the norm and we see this more frequently and you wonder how many like what are we teaching people what are people? There's got to be some level of commitment that, like, even if it's, like, again, you could look at guys that job hop as coaches, but if those guys leave that job, it's going to cost somebody something. There is no opportunity cost.

There is nothing you are losing if you are one of these dudes, one of these players. So if you spend five, six, seven years, and really this will date back to when you're probably 10 years old playing AAU basketball or biddy basketball, like because people, these coaches are on your campuses and are at your tournaments when you're 10, 11, 12 years old now to keep an eye on you. So you're treated like you're special from the time you're 10 years old to the time you're 25 years old. What happens when you ain't special anymore? It's like the child stars, man. You're number one on a TV show. You're Webster or you're whatever.

You're one of these young kids that's a big star. What happens when you grow a beard and nobody wants you anymore? How can you handle your life? And you wonder what happens when you hit the real world. Now, I'm sure there are some people who have good families and good situations and maybe are smart with money and they've got people who are teaching them more about how to handle money. I'm not doubting that. I'm sure that happens. But I think we're sending people out into the world and out into the real world after they leave college basketball or college football who have no concept of how the real world actually works. It's like Dickie Roberts, former child star, the movie, what's his name, movie, the David Spade movie where he's a former child star and

he's got an arrested development. He has no real idea of how the real world works. That would be my concern. And it's okay to look at nuance. The problem is if you look at that nuance, people talk to you like you're some out of touch, fuddy duddy old white guy yelling at cloud. Like that's the problem with most of our arguments today is that's what it comes back to. You're either super out of touch and you don't get it or you're down is what it means. Like and that's any argument. Go to social media and say, you know what? I don't really like Beyonce's new album.

People or I don't like country beyonce many of the responses you'll get will be from people telling you that you're a racist piece of shit and you just don't like it that a black person's in country music but then you tell them but i fucking love the four album it's one of my favorite albums ever it's a beautiful thing it's a great album love on top uh all countdown good songs right but that doesn't matter because there's no nuance like they don't care the people have decided at this point. Same with politics. You come out and say, you know what, I'm a Trump supporter,

but I don't really like this decision he made. There's going to be a bunch of people that are just going to tell you that you're a blue-haired liberal fuck, and that's just how the reaction is going to be. People don't care about nuance. We just throw a label on people based on one element of what they believe and not the whole thing. I believe players should be getting paid and they should be able to go out there and get as much as they want.

I also believe that this NIL is a total farce and goes against what the initial point was, which is, hey, go out and earn money based on your name, image, and likeness, which is fair, but it's not going to be used as a recruiting tool. Well, it's obviously being used as a recruiting tool because schools are able to get players to come to their school and they're talking to them during the season. They're talking to them while they're still playing for other teams and they're rounding up NIL money from boosters. Brian Kelly has thrown a million dollars in this LSU pool so other people can match it and they'll have more NIL money. That's the problem. So you want to tell me that I can't feel that it's kind of nasty and kind of gross the way they're doing it whenever we're talking about dudes throwing money into giant pools so guys can be lured to their school to play. Like you've got to have some level of fucking nuance to this

shit. Like that's the problem with our society is people lack nuance. And part of it is I think many people, even with all of the access to every information you can need. Like, let me give you an example. I'm in the car yesterday. The song Kiss You All Over by Exile. I want to kiss you all over and over again comes on the radio. I go, Jilly, did Exile ever have another fucking song? I'm like, I don't remember.

You know what I do? Go to fucking Wikipedia. Go to Google. I look up the band Exile. I found out that their lead singer who sang that song died of hepatitis in the mid-80s. And I learned that they transitioned from doing pop music because they couldn't find another hit. Became a country act in the 80s and had 10 number one singles. I learned that in 10 seconds.

It's easy to find information if you want it. The problem is people are lazy and people with all the access to everything they have now are dumber than they've ever been and they are willfully stupid and they want to be stupid. That's the problem. You can make an argument with someone and use any sort of nuance in this

and people don't care. Shit, I told you that I haven't been looking at the for you category on Twitter, which is a great to avoid. Somehow it was on there today. I don't know if I had swiped wrong or something or actually hit a button or a button hit in my pocket, whatever for you. But I didn't realize it was on for you because I have not flipped it over to the for you in a week. And I'm seeing the stories that are popping up and I'm like I don't really give a shit what Jason Whitlock has to say about men being emasculated and I don't really care about why are these and then like why is there a story popping up where some LSU fan is talking shit to

old men like why am I seeing this ah because the 4U was on, you know? I don't know. I know I'm kind of all over the place on this, but again, nuance is important, and people lack nuance in anything they discuss because nuance isn't popular right now. It's very popular to just sit around and say dumb shit and have incendiary opinions

and absolute opinions without looking at all of everything so you're either a piece of shit that doesn't want basically when it comes to the the the discussion of of the nil stuff and transfer portal it's you're either someone who totally understands that you're down with these kids and they're being exploited or you're a piece of shit that wants to exploit the kids and you're probably just an angry bigot that sits around and never accomplished anything in your life anyway. Those are the two camps you can fall into that. It's bullshit. All right, more to come.