Why the nonstop basketball recruiting calendar ‘is a nightmare’ for college coaches
NORTH AUGUSTA, S.C. — Dan Hurley might’ve been the happiest man in the gym last week at Nike’s Peach Jam, the premier basketball recruiting event of the year, as he basked in the afterglow of a national championship. And why not? Five-star prospects perk up a bit more these days when the Connecticut coach slides into a courtside seat at their games.
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But even Hurley felt an enormous sense of relief that the spring and summer evaluation season was finally winding down.
“With the propensity for players to look for greener pastures, it’s disconcerting to be on the road recruiting as much as we are,” he said. “You don’t know what you’re coming back to. We’re all paranoid, and I’d be a lot happier on campus, on the court — less recruiting days, more time on the court with my team.”
Alabama coach Nate Oats just signed his fourth consecutive top-15 recruiting class and cleaned up in the transfer portal, putting the Crimson Tide in position to win the SEC for a third time in four years. But he looked and sounded weary standing outside the Riverview Park Activities Center between games. Building a roster these days, or more often rebuilding a roster, is an exhausting, neverending endeavor.
“We had an official visit going on July 4,” Oats said. “The transfer portal has changed stuff. Since the season ended, I kind of made myself take Easter Sunday off to spend with the family, but that’s it. I don’t think I’ve had another day off since the season ended, really. It’s bad. I’m not going to sit here and complain — there are a lot of people who would trade jobs with me — but it definitely makes this harder.”
Not everyone hates it, but every coach The Athletic spoke to last week at Peach Jam at least acknowledged it: The Calendar, as college staffs refer to their schedules from March to August, never has been fuller. The day after this year’s Selection Sunday, a 60-day transfer-portal window opened. There’s a proliferation of recruiting obligations both on and off campus throughout the spring and summer, as well as the looming possibility that a player who has graduated (or does so by August) might still bounce for another program without penalty, just before the new season starts.
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“The schedule is just crazy,” Rutgers coach Steve Pikiell said. “July used to be a crazy month; now every month seems to be kind of crazy. And you’re away from your family a lot, so it puts a lot of pressure on them.”
Kansas State coach Jerome Tang, whose stated objective is to have more “dudes” than the opponent — a philosophy that got the Wildcats within one bucket of the Final Four last season — still has two available scholarships and is trying to finalize his roster in the middle of July.
“I mean, it’s incredible,” he said. “Thank God we’ve got a wonderful staff and I’ve got an understanding wife. It used to be that June was a time we got to stay on campus and have time with our families, do vacations. Now, we have recruiting in May, recruiting in June, recruiting in July — and, you know, especially with the portal, you’re recruiting one month before the season ends. So yeah, something’s gotta be done.”
In the past two offseasons, college basketball has lost four national championship-winning, Naismith Hall of Fame coaches to retirement. Maybe NIL, the transfer portal and the constant need to be recruiting and re-recruiting weren’t the only factors in Mike Krzyzewski, Roy Williams, Jay Wright and Jim Boeheim walking away from the game, but those things certainly did not make sticking around more attractive. Another Hall of Famer still on the sidelines, Kentucky’s John Calipari, had recently been pushing the idea of summer exhibition games between college teams. He no longer thinks that’s feasible.
“We need to pause that,” Calipari said Sunday night. “And the reason is: We got too many other things happening right now. You got all kind of stuff that coaches are dealing with. We don’t need to put one more thing on our plate.”
A few potential solutions are on the way, including a proposal to cut the transfer-portal window in half by 2024. This spring, the NCAA Division I Council reduced the allowable recruiting period by 28 days in football to give coaches in that sport more of a breather. And last month, the council extended the men’s basketball “dead period” from Aug. 6-20. That reflects a growing recognition of the very real burnout factor among today’s coaches.
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And to call it a young man’s game is to ignore a young man’s life off the court. Wes Miller, Cincinnati’s 40-year-old coach, recently sounded the saddest alarm of all recently on the Field of 68 podcast. The Calendar, he said, is so “out of control,” he’s hesitant to start a family.
“There is no time to breathe,” he said. “There’s not one day where I’ve gone home since the season ended and said, ‘All right, I’m going to clean my house today. I’m going to do my laundry today.’ And I’m not married; I don’t have kids. I have assistants with wives, with young children, and I feel bad for them. I don’t know how they can be the kind of husbands they have to be and the kind of fathers they have to be, given the landscape that we’re in right now.
“Something has to change. I’d like to be a father one day. I’d like to get married again and have a productive marriage. I don’t even know how to cultivate that or begin that process in the world we’re in.”
Craig Robinson, the Princeton-educated former Oregon State head coach who is now the executive director of the National Association of Basketball Coaches, has fielded constant complaints about The Calendar from his constituents during the past three years. But the noise never has been louder. And Miller’s comments, especially, have struck a chord.
“I mean, just think about that statement. That’s a hard thing to come to grips with,” Robinson said. “I think our coaches are really serious about making this an industry that people can look forward to being part of. More than any other time in the history of college basketball, you have coaches starting to care about what they’re doing away from the game — their mental health, their family health. They’re looking for a time to say, ‘I’m just off. I can take a break. I can recharge. I can spend time with my family and save my marriage.’”
If that sounds extreme, consider: In the 190 days from January until the end of Peach Jam (and other shoe-circuit championships) on July 9, there are only 20 total “dead” days when no in-person contact or evaluation of prospects are allowed. From the end of the season in early April through Peach Jam, there are 30 days coaches are allowed (and thus expected) to be off campus recruiting and/or evaluating — and another 47 days they can be on campus hosting recruits for visits. The transfer portal opened this year on March 13, creating a feeding frenzy during the NCAA Tournament, and it didn’t close until May 11. And that’s just the deadline to enter the portal, not to pick a new school, which can take weeks longer.
📣Update: NCAA Division I men’s basketball 2022-23 recruiting calendar📣
Check it out ⬇️
Note: NCAA Division I women’s basketball 2022-23 recruiting calendar will be updated and posted in the coming weeks.
— NCAA Compliance (@NCAACompliance) February 24, 2023
Then there are live evaluation periods for high school prospects in April, June and July, between the Nike, Adidas and Under Armour grassroots circuits, the NBPA Top 100 camp, USA Basketball events and newer NCAA-sponsored events. The cherry on top? Since graduate transfers don’t have any restrictions on when they enter the portal, anyone who fits that bill can bolt right up until classes begin in the fall semester, which will mean some late-summer scrambling for a few unlucky coaches.
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Duke coach Jon Scheyer noted last week that his sixth-year senior center, Ryan Young, “could leave tomorrow.”
“And that’s why I’ve been very nice to him every day,” Scheyer joked. “I give him lots of compliments every day. But that’s not right, though, because it’s not fair to the team. And ultimately, there has to be a point where you know who your group is.”
So what can be done to bring a little sanity back to roster construction in college basketball and nip a potential burnout epidemic in the bud? How can the NCAA fix The Calendar? It might be asking too much from an organization that often has found this in short supply, but Virginia coach Tony Bennett believes it’s easy enough with just a dash of common sense.
“There needs to be some more guardrails,” Bennett said. “It’s just time to change. This is such a good profession in so many ways, but if you have to sacrifice families or relationships, marriages, then you have to count the cost. I think there’s a way where you can do it all. There are no substitutions — you gotta get after it and work — but I think sometimes we make it harder than it has to be. I just think it can be a little more strategic, and then it’ll be better for the health of coaches and families.”
For most, Robinson said, it boils down to two simple tweaks: more dead time and a tighter transfer portal window. Last month, the NCAA Division I Council proposed reducing the total number of days that athletes in all sports can enter the transfer portal from 60 to 30 days. That will be vetted by multiple committees and could be voted on in October. The idea had unanimous support from more than a dozen head coaches who spoke to The Athletic at Peach Jam. They also had related suggestions.
“You gotta push the portal opening past the national championship game,” Hurley said. “The fact that the portal was open while the season was still going on is not good. So push the portal back and shorten up the period.”
“And if you know you’re going to graduate, maybe you have to go in the portal by a certain time, so you don’t just have kids entering the portal all summer long,” Oats said. “It can’t be nonstop, all summer long, the possibility of kids leaving and having to recruit again. The NBA has got a free-agency window. Can’t be a free-for-all, all offseason, up until classes start. That’s a nightmare.”
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“I think it has to be the same dates for grad transfers and for undergrads,” Pikiell said. “Otherwise, you’ve just got a full year of free agency. So I really think that has to be synchronized so it can give coaches a chance to kind of know what their rosters are going to look like at a reasonable time.”
“I’m all for guys finding the right fit and right situation, so I don’t have a problem with guys coming and going,” Texas coach Rodney Terry said, “but also have a really hard start and stop date so we can do some roster management.”
George Washington coach Chris Caputo, a longtime Jim Larrañaga assistant at George Mason and Miami, doesn’t have to think too far back to the “old days,” which was really just a few years ago when assembling a college basketball team was all about long-term strategy.
“We used to put up on the board: ‘OK, this is our roster next year and this will be our roster the following year.’ People laugh at that now,” Caputo said. “For most people, the portal has taken a lot of their recruiting time. We had 13 official visits in the spring, and that’s probably about average for most teams. That’s why we need to get control of the calendar and maybe set some parameters rather than just being reactive to all the recent rule changes and just being on our heels. I talk to friends in the NBA, and they can’t believe that when our season ends, it actually gets busier.”
One way to improve that, perhaps, is to cut back or condense the number of live recruiting periods in the spring and summer. Right now, there are two weekends each in April, June and July. Not many coaches seem especially keen on the NCAA-sponsored camps that will allow live evaluations July 25-30, especially since those events have struggled to attract top Division I talent.
“Now more than any other time, coaches are looking at the summer as not being as important,” Robinson said, “because with the portal, you’re recruiting fewer high school players. So the need to go out and see them and be seen by them at a constant drip, drip, drip is not as necessary as it used to be.”
Not to mention, the players could probably use a break, too.
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“After an event like this, these kids are done, they’re fried,” Pittsburgh coach Jeff Capel said at Peach Jam. “They’ve finished their high school season, jumped right into AAU, which is April, May, June, July, and it’s just too much for these kids.”
“You love the game, you love to watch it, you love to evaluate, but it’s got to be a cleaner schedule, more balanced schedule and more of an opportunity for us to be on campus with our team and get ready for the season,” Hurley said. “I think there’s just too many different days in the summer for these high school kids. I don’t think it’s healthy for the players, and I do think if you want the college product to continue to be better, we need to be on campus with our teams more.”
“You want to work with the guys who already have their hats in the ring,” Terry said, “the guys who’ve already said they want to be there with you.”
The women’s college game has two week-long complete shutdown periods in recruiting, during which no calls or texts to prospects can be made. It’s an idea many men’s coaches like in theory — Bennett called it a “great thing” — but they might be too distrustful of each other to implement for themselves.
“There is this question: ‘If I’m shut down, is it a real shutdown? Or are there some scofflaws who aren’t necessarily shutting down?’” Robinson said. “There’s a paranoia because who would police it? Things that are going on now aren’t getting policed very well either.”
Therein lies another major issue: Coaches would like a lot more control of their own sport. They might not be able to do much about law enforcement, but they want more say in the writing of those laws. Robinson said the NABC and its members are fighting for autonomy from the NCAA, the ability to come up with changes to the “rules of engagement” on their own — or at least have a seat at the table in the decision-making process.
“I think the NCAA has heard us on that, and we’re hoping there is going to be an experimental time when they sort of let us oversee our own thing, so that changing the calendar would be easier, rather than having to go through the myriad NCAA legislative bodies to get that passed,” Robinson said.
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In the meantime, for as long as The Calendar remains such an unwieldy beast, it’s up to individual coaches to choose how consumed they’re willing to be by it. The only way to get a real offseason right now is to make tough choices and create your own.
“You have to,” Capel said, “to have any chance of surviving in this business. You have to make time. You can’t be so tied up in, ‘Other people are doing this.’ You have to figure out what’s right for you. The calendar makes it hard to step away, but you still have to do it, because if you don’t, you’re not going to be good for your team. You won’t have the necessary energy. You won’t be good for your family. So I take time, I compartmentalize, I decide I’m not going to be plugged in certain times or I’m not going to go some places. I tell my coaches to take time and get away. Because at some point, you have to give yourself a mental break, or you won’t be good for anybody.”
— The Athletic’s Brendan Marks contributed to this story.
(Top photo of Dan Hurley, center, and other coaches at Peach Jam: Kyle Tucker / The Athletic)
