Portal Player Advice

This is great, pass it on to your players:


Sean Tuohy Jr.
@SJTuohy

Portal open! One piece of advice I would give a player having been on all sides of the portal process: don’t mess up your life’s money for a one-time bag.

Yeah, school “X” offered you 50k more than school “Y” did. But, now you transferred to a place that didn’t have your program; you lost credits. You played at 3 places and have no network and no one that has a vested interest in your success after graduating.

Even more so, with all these redshirts. If you have ONE year left to graduate and TWO years left to play: finish your degree. You can always go somewhere your last year and chase the bag or go down a level and play.

Just make sure “life changing money” IS life changing and not just briefly lifestyle changing. Factors like quality of life and cost of living matter.

One last thing on it: if you leveraging the portal to get more $ at your current school and that does NOT work, it’s even less likely the portal is going to be beneficial. Be careful!

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Who am I kidding, these players are mostly after “now” wow money. Their wow isn’t enough to live on over a year or two - if spent wisely - so most will run through it pretty quickly (not talking the $500k+ players).

It’s hard to blame some of them they were never taught the value of money nor how to manage it. We can look and say it’s foolish how they blew thru it but they don’t know better. You also have some greedy parents advising them and wanting their cut. NCAA is worthless to do anything.

The key now is having a front office that can ID talent that can contribute year 1. Used to be recruits developed for a 4 year return and would improve every year and break out year 3/4. Now you can’t afford to pay players to take that long plus they will leave before you get the payoff.

We need front offices who can sniff out trouble makers and those who live at the docs office. Those who will stop working hard once they get paid. Portal is so different than recruiting and is why so many are hiring front office staffs just to manage this.

You still need to recruit and some will actually stay for many other reasons. But it matters way less.

I seen USC has the #1 class in 26. That means so much less than it did 10 years ago. Most of that class will be gone within 3 years. And schools are gonna pay less to raw rookies who can red shirt as they need to put more into portal pay. It’s simple economics. So the recruiting rankings mean less than before.

One thing the recruiting beat writers will need to do is shift focus. These folks follow recruits in HS all over the country. Camps and more camps. Competitions. They put 100% of their effort into HS recruits.

With Portal and insta transfers they will need to adapt and evaluate actual existing college players. It will become more important to grade and track existing players than recruits. The amount of freshman playing and hugely contributing is way less than 2/3/4 and even 5 year guys percentage wise.

Schools will have to adapt to a portal “free agency” world where rosters churn so fast. And be good finding that hidden talent. Look at Indy. Front offices will be as important as your coaches (already is).