Strike 1: It was a rough first year for Tad Boyle and the Colorado Buffaloes men’s basketball team back in the rugged Big 12 Conference. No way to sugar coat a 3-17 conference record, especially when you can’t blame youth and inexperience. The Buffs said goodbye to five seniors while winning their final regular season game at the CU events center on Saturday. Youth wasn’t the issue. Having to rebuild almost an entire roster was.
This is uncharted territory for Boyle. The winningest coach in CU Men’s hoops history is used to winning. But after sending three starters off to the NBA after last season, and then having several other contributors bail out via the transfer portal, Boyle had to start over. And what he ended up with wasn’t totally to his liking. He spent the past season, in his words, “putting fingers in the dyke.”
“We need to have future NBA players on our roster,” he said. Those guys are no longer waiting to get paid.
College basketball aint the way it used to be, the way old-school Boyle liked and excelled at.
In a way, it was kind of fitting that senior Julian Hammond, a rare four-year Buff, capped off his career with a big game against TCU on Senior Day. Four-year guys are the way it was. Today, it’s all about the Transfer Portal and Name, Image and Likeness cash payouts. Five years ago, Deion Sanders couldn’t have been a college coach. Now, his way is the way.
Boyle, a Greeley native, is the anti-Deion. He wants to sit down in the living room of a top high school prospect and try to convince him to come to Boulder for reasons other than just money. The Buffs 15-year head coach has done things very successfully that way for many years now. Six NCAA Tournament bids (would be seven if COVID hadn’t cancelled one tournament) and five trips to the NIT.
The current season is Boyle’s first losing campaign since coming to CU.
Like most college coaches, he’s trying to adapt to the new way of doing things. Unlike Deion, checkbook recruiting isn’t his best thing.
Boyle told the media last week that he’s not going to cast a ballot for Big 12 Coach of the Year until he sees how much each program is spending on “salaries” for their respective rosters. Can’t imagine he’s going to like what he sees, assuming he gets to see anything at all. It can’t be any secret that the Buffs “payroll” for basketball won’t come close to what it is at some of the other power programs in the conference.
There’s already a finite amount of money that’s brought annually in to pay CU athletes. And it can’t be any secret that the lion’s share of what money is brought in via the CU collective is going to Deion Sanders and the football program. Football is King at CU like it is most other places. Will that change any time soon? Unlikely.
On the plus side, if a Federal judge gives the okay to a court settlement early next month as expected, that finite amount that’s brought in to be shared will become locked in across the board at roughly $21.5 million per school. That’s the revenue sharing of all collective “NIL” money across all sports. Boyle can only lobby for men’s basketball to get a big chunk of it. Odds are that he won’t particularly like what his program gets compared to several of his top rivals.
Given a level playing field, Boyle could excel once again. However, it very unlikely CU hoops will get the kind of funding that say, Kansas (Boyle’s alma mater) hoops does. At KU, basketball remains King.
Although the standards for what equals “success” at the two programs are vastly different, it wasn’t a banner year for the Jayhawks this season, either. The nation’s preseason number one team finished sixth in a conference they have typically owned, even dropping out of the Top 25 at one point. The calls for the job of head coach Bill Self haven’t registered much yet, but Self himself did consider leaving for the open job at Oklahoma State after last season, which was the second consecutive year the Jayhawks had lost in the second round of the NCAA tournament.
What might happen if the Jayhawks falter early in the tournament again this season? What happens if Self wasn’t going to be their head coach anymore? Would the program look west at a KU alum who has proven himself to be among the best college hoops coaches in the country over the past decade and a half?
Imagine what Tad Boyle could do with the resources that would be available to him at his alma mater?
For Boyle’s part, he’s been consistent in saying the CU is his “dream job” and that he intends to finish his coaching career in Boulder. But he hasn’t said that much lately, ever since NIL and the Transfer Portal have rendered his favorite sport almost unrecognizable. It’s not hard to envision Boyle gazing at the situation in Lawrence and seeing a place where basketball is King and where the revenue sharing splits might favor hoops over even football.
In situations like this, perhaps a guy can go home again?
