UConn men’s basketball coach Dan Hurley spent the weekend at the center of an intense court from the Los Angeles Lakers. Before Hurley decided his own fate, his impending departure was treated, in some corners, as a scathing indictment of what college sports has become as an institution.
Geno Auriemma, from his perspective coaching the other half of the UConn basketball program, had already decided what it would be about when Hurley left. “The state of college basketball is a disaster,” Auriemma said, with the NCAA no longer even feigning focus on the well-being of student-athletes. “It never matters again and I don’t want to hear anyone say those words associated with college basketball,” Auriemma told radio host Dan Patrick. “They’re professional athletes, but we don’t call ourselves that, so we might as well go and train professional athletes where it’s real.”
Charles Barkley said he understood why Hurley would leave: because college sports had become too chaotic. “I would call it the Wild West, but that would be disrespectful to the Wild West,” Barkley said. “I have no idea; how did we ruin college sports? And I understand why Dan says, ‘Might as well go to the NBA and make a lot of money. Don’t have the headaches of NIL and the portal transfer,” because I have no idea where college sports are going, but it’s going in the wrong direction.
Alas, Hurley is still UConn’s coach. He’ll get a nice raise from this very public flirting, which may be the only reason he was public. But it remains true that he turned down a deal that would have made him LeBron James’ coach and paid him $70 million over six years, more than any college basketball coach could earn for the moment. If Hurley leaving UConn would have been such a decisive negative comment on the state of college athletics, then Hurley would stay. I must say the opposite. These are the rules. Turns out, being a major college basketball or football coach is still a pretty good deal. Who knew?
Auriemma and Barkley were just two famous figures who play into a very popular argument that college sports has lost its way. The argument is part of a rich lineage. Players changing schools every offseason and payments to athletes are the latest things raising concerns about college sports’ demise. A non-exhaustive list of other things that were supposed to kill business includes integration, gambling, Title IX, “excessive emphasis” on sports over class, military conscription, and too much intra-conference games. No ecosystem loves contrived existential crises as much as college sports, and the present moment lends itself to it. The first athletes were granted the right to freely transfer their schools. Then they were allowed to receive money from third parties, and then they were essentially paid to play for their schools through team fan collectives. Soon, the schools themselves will pay the players. One could describe this in a nefarious-sounding way, such as Barkley calling it the “Wild, Wild West.” Another favorite is to call payment for services “pay to play.”
This period of upheaval – and it really is East a period of upheaval – fits Hurley perfectly given the Lakers’ work. An ESPN producer lumped Hurley in with Michigan Chargers football coach-turned-Los Angeles coach Jim Harbaugh, saying the two defending champion coaches “rushing to the pros within months of each other is a sad commentary on the state of college athletics.” If even the most successful coaches of the two biggest college sports want new jobs, then what could these sports offer in their current “state”? But this question lacks insight, in that it leaves out a lot about Harbaugh and Hurley’s situations. Harbaugh was a successful NFL coach before becoming Michigan’s coach and had yearned for another chance at the Super Bowl for several years (at least). He also faced potentially serious NCAA discipline associated with the sign-stealing at Michigan. Hurley got an offer to coach not a perennial third-rate organization like, say, the Charlotte Hornets, but the damn Los Angeles Lakers, who have LeBron James on their roster. (Famously, no coach has ever had the chance to coach LeBron James in college.) Hurley taking that chance wouldn’t say as much about the “state” of college sports as it would say about the ongoing condition of college sports of “not having LeBron James”. .”
Not that all is well right now for college coaches. The job has undoubtedly become more difficult. In the past, players were recruited only once, right out of high school. They now have to be recruited again every year, sometimes several times a year. They now have financial requirements that another school could meet if the current school does not. Exhausting work just got more exhausting. A prominent SEC football coach-turned-assistant left the sport a few years ago (although he has since returned). The greatest college football coach of all time also retired in January. Several other high-profile head coaches have suffered demotions to take professional jobs where they don’t have to put out as many fires. (Although it’s often the case that these coaches are about to be fired in a year or two anyway.) A little order might do some good for everyone involved.
But the difficulty of the work is only part of the deal. Power conference coaches in football and men’s basketball always get an incredible deal. Most of them aren’t good enough for the pros, which represent a higher level of training, as well as a higher level of play. However, many are paid like professional league coaches, or better yet, for two reasons specific to university sports. First, the schools don’t pay for the work, and the money has to go somewhere, so it gradually went to the guys with the clipboards, and that’s almost all the guys. (Schools will soon pay players, but it will take a long time for college athletes to get the same revenue share as professionals.) Second, coaches get a bump specifically to deal with all the drama that comes with being be at university. Athletics. A coach who is not as good at coaching offensive linemen as his NFL counterparts can make the better part of a million dollars on a college campus, far more than one who does the same job in the NFL . This is because he also has to recruit players.
Hurley, of course, is not a replaceable assistant. He is a living legend, the best college hardwood coach today, with two consecutive national titles under his belt. He’s also now a god at UConn, more or less invincible for at least a decade, and on track, according to Connecticut’s governor, to become the highest-paid college basketball coach. It will likely come to less than what Hurley would have made with the Lakers, but he will still build generational wealth and be able to run UConn however he wants.
And in college sports, that latitude is well-deserved. Hurley is a true wizard of modern college coaching, the guy who seems to have cracked the code better than anyone. He plays the transfer game but doesn’t rely on it so much that it hinders the development of his existing talent. He is a scholar of Xs and Os. He doesn’t even have a particularly easy job; UConn is the most successful program of the century, but on the men’s side, it’s not the kind of prestige brand that can deliver great recruiting classes on autopilot.
Hurley has to fight for all of this, and he’s done it while getting rich and seeming like a guy who’s still vaguely enjoying life. He was at a Billy Joel concert with his wife in the middle of the Lakers’ hiring process. He screams his head off at the referees during games, but he prays, meditates and journals, then practices in the morning after UConn’s rare losses. Hurley doesn’t complain about the difficulty of his job. Instead, it views the transfer portal and player payments as ways to gain an advantage over competitors. College coaches who can’t do a fringe Hurley impersonation don’t have to worry about fielding a call from The Lakers.