One Fleeting Moment
What a garbage-time layup said about the future of college sports.
The other day, I promised — or maybe just predicted? — I’d spend more of the month writing about basketball the sport than basketball as a symbol of change and uncertainty (the latter of which is my beat). And I mostly stuck to that in Raleigh, looking at the hype around Cooper Flagg, Duke’s ridiculous height and the end of UConn’s three-peat bid. But there was at least one moment that kept nagging at me, at least in terms of how it connected to where the industry is headed. So here goes …
One Fleeting Moment
The Raleigh site didn’t have a lot of those “only in March” things, though at one point a tournament staffer crept up and slipped my whole coffee into a NCAA/Powerade cup, since Powerade pays a lot for no other drink logos to go on TV.
Okay, only in March.
But there was a pretty cool moment during the first round Friday, when Duke coach Jon Scheyer emptied his bench in a blowout of Mount St. Mary’s. Grad student Spencer Hubbard, a 5-foot-8 guard, was on the practice squad, then walked on to the team, then earned a scholarship before last season. A friend who’s a Duke diehard told me Hubbard is a “fan favorite and then some.” And in the closing minutes of the game, playing in front of a huge Duke crowd — Raleigh, after all, is 20 miles from campus — Hubbard drove the baseline and flipped in a layup. The place went nuts. Another friend (non-Duke-fan division) texted me: “Cooper Flagg who? Duke is Spencer Hubbard’s team!!”
Okay, I’ll say it again: Only in March.
But all of it stood out to me for another reason. Pending a settlement of the House, Hubbard and Carter antitrust cases, a lot of of changes are coming to college sports, likely starting this summer. The biggest is that Division I schools will be able to pay athletes directly for the first time. And if they do — and all power-conference schools will — they will be subject to new roster limits across all sports.
As part of the settlement terms, roster limits would replace scholarship limits, meaning schools could give as many scholarships as they want, just up to a certain number of athletes per sport. That’s a stark shift. A football program, for example, has maybe carried 130 players despite only having 85 full-ride scholarships. But if the settlement goes through, the roster limit for D-I football teams would be 105 (with no more scholarship restrictions). More money to the athletes, in most cases, but far fewer athletes overall.
So how does this connect to Spencer Hubbard and a heart-warming, garbage-time layup in the NCAA tournament? Thanks for asking! These roster limits will eliminate a lot of walk-on spots across the country, especially at well-funded programs that can add a ton of scholarship money to their budgets. Hubbard, as I mentioned earlier, has been a scholarship player for the past two seasons. But his unlikely path — practice squad to walk-on, walk-on to a scholarship, a scholarship to scoring in the freakin’ tournament for Duke — could soon be even less likely, if not almost extinct.
The roster limit for men’s basketball would be 15. Duke has 15 players on its team. I don’t know how the Blue Devils will manage walk-ons moving forward, nor is it possible to know how many D-I walk-ons there will be next year, in five years, in 10. This will affect men’s and women’s sports. And to be clear, track and field, swimming and diving, soccer, etc., will all feel this more acutely than top-tier basketball.
Hubbard’s moment was just a quick reminder of what’s coming. The stadium didn’t go crazy because that layup turned a 41-point lead into a 43-point lead. It went crazy for the story, and the stories are going to change.
“Yeah, I mean, I definitely hope players can keep doing what I’ve done as much as possible,” Hubbard said the next day. “Walk-ons matter to programs. They bring a lot, I think especially on the days where it seems really tough or like a slog for the scholarship guys, then they see these walk-ons pushing through and it makes it a little easier to bear down.”
I asked if, when he joined the practice squad as a freshman, he could have imagined, well, any of this, having a scholarship, scoring in what was basically a home game in March Madness, playing on a title favorite.
“No, no, no,” he said, shaking his head. “I was just taking it one day at a time, having fun. I really couldn’t have dreamed it.”
Where there is gain, there is certainly going to be some pain (growing).
Great observation about this moment in time, Jesse.
Big picture, I think this just further formalizes the death of the fiction of the student athlete.
You'll still have walk-on stories. They'll just happen at small-time schools, and if they stand out as freshman, then by senior year they could end up at Duke via the transfer portal.
But somebody like Hubbard who probably has no NBA dreams, and is smart enough to get into a school like Duke without a scholarship, and can either pay the tuition or qualify for financial aid... that guy -- that student athlete -- is still going to choose Duke, and that guy will never be on the team.