When I asked Idaho State men’s basketball coach Ryan Looney if he had any reaction to losing Miguel Tomley to bitter rival Weber State, he declined comment.
“Gonna focus on our current players and guys we are recruiting,” Looney responded.
Which is absolutely the right response.
But there was one that was probably quite a bit more universal from a fan on the “Bengal Blitz,” a message board on ISU sports:
“Driving down to Ogden to watch Tomley play is right on par with the excitement I feel for my next root canal!”
It’s bad enough that half of ISU’s roster left via the transfer portal after one of the more encouraging seasons in recent Bengal basketball history — including both point guards, Maleek Arington and Kolton Mitchell. But now ISU fans are going to have to watch Tomley, who almost single-handedly took down the Wildcats in a 26-point outburst the last time ISU played Weber State — come to Reed Gym in purple next winter.
There are also rumblings, which Looney couldn’t confirm, that Mitchell has committed to playing for Idaho, another Bengal rival. That could mean up to four years of watching Mitchell from afar develop into the kind of player that Looney foresaw when he said, “Kolton Mitchell is going to be a great Bengal,” after his 18-point breakout game against Campbell last season.
The transfer portal has been a hot topic of conversation ever since the NCAA first introduced the concept in 2018. Originally, the idea was to give athletes more freedom to maybe rectify mistakes they made in their original selection of schools, or to move on when the coach that recruited them was fired or took another job. It quickly, combined with the newly-introduced name, image and likeness (NIL) rules, however, turned college athletics into almost unfettered free agency.
The courts, in a series of rulings on cases brought by either athletes, or NCAA member schools, have repeatedly found the NCAA cannot legally limit the ability of its athletes to earn outside income, or to change schools and be immediately eligible. Chief Justice John Roberts went so far as to write in one case that he saw the NCAA as an illegal monopoly, and every time the NCAA has tried to apply some kind of restrictions on transfers or NIL opportunities, other courts have joined in to overturn those restrictions.
It is becoming increasingly apparent that the only way schools can institute any kind of reasonable limitations on transfer rules or NIL compensation, is through collective bargaining with athletes. That would require schools to classify their athletes as:
“Employees,” a concept that the NCAA has fought, tooth and nail for, going on around 100 years. But Dartmouth’s men’s basketball team has already voted to unionize in the wake of a National Labor Relations Board decision that they are, indeed, “employees” of the university.
While that decision is fought over in the courts, the transfer portal remains as popular a tool for roster building − and tearing down − as ever. It is true that the transfer portal door swings both ways. While Idaho State was losing players through the portal, they also gained a commitment from Cam Slaymaker, who started his career at Cal-Northridge, then transferred to Division II Southwest Nazarene. The Bengals will be looking to add other transfer portal players to their roster before next season.
But the transfer portal is starting to show signs of, if not killing the golden goose − at the very least putting the bird in the ICU. In talking with some ISU supporters in recent years, they are expressing frustration that if the ultimate goal of college athletics is to help athletes get an education, why are so many of them leaving the institution they started at without a degree? As college athletics becomes more and more “professionalized,” those supporters are starting to wonder if their donations would be better spent elsewhere.
Leaving a school after a year or two also frays the lifetime relationship between athlete and institution, and all that it implies. For example, would a school consider putting athletes into its hall of fame if those players had substantial careers, but left before their eligibility expired? Athletic departments count a great deal on former athletes for funding support — who will the transfer athletes give his or her allegiances to after their athletic careers are over?
The transfer portal is also causing college coaches to re-think their recruiting strategy, to the point where some loath to recruit high school players. This is especially true at mid-major institutions like Idaho State, where very few freshmen come in physically or emotionally equipped to compete immediately. The school then invests a year or two in those athletes, and then, just when they start becoming most productive, they hit the portal.
Coaches are starting to wonder out loud, “Why should I invest in the two least productive years of a player’s college career, then have them walk away, when I can take junior college or four-year transfer players that somebody else has done the development work on? Why not take the best two years of a players’ career?”
I believe Idaho State will continue to recruit the occasional eastern Idaho high school player who can contribute over time, like Preston’s Brayden Parker, who got better every year over his five-year ISU career. But I think you’ll see ISU count more and more on junior college and portal players who bring immediate productivity and are less-likely to bail before their eligibility is complete.
There is also a sense that athletes, their parents and their inner circle of advisors are getting an unrealistic view of what kind of NIL money is really out there. I’m hearing stories of athletes and their parents coming into coaches’ offices looking for five- or six-figure NIL deals in order to stay out of the portal, only to find that once they jump in, that kind of money is not available for athletes of their skill levels. Some athletes have backup plans, but some don’t and wind up without a landing spot.
I don’t blame college athletes for taking full advantage of the new systems. Each one of ISU’s transfers is leaving for individual reasons: Tomley, for example, is graduating in May with a degree in criminal justice and Weber State offers a master’s degree in that field, while Idaho State does not. That circumstance is really what initiated the changes in transfer rules — allowing graduate transfers to be immediately eligible if the school they were going to offered a program their current school did not.
But I will tell you that, while my wife doesn’t like me to swear and last week was Holy Week, when I read that Tomley was going to the dreaded Weber Wildcats, well, let’s just say there is a confessional in my future.
Brad Bugger has been observing athletics in southeastern Idaho for over 40 years, as a fan, sports writer and broadcaster. He can be reached at bpbugger@gmail.com