We went to an authority on college basketball to try to understand the new universe. Author and longtime chronicler of all things NCAA, hoops and “student athletes” John Feinstein tries to explain the wild, wild west of “Name Image and Likeness” NIL to Nestor as Terps hoops season begins under new head coach Kevin Willard.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS: maryland, nestor, transfer, rule, coach, book, student athletes, baltimore, umbc, players, fans, money, towson, big, army navy, mark, gary, good, game, years
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What about wn? S T Towson, Baltimore and Baltimore positive still broadcasting high quality mono sound that am 1570 Make sure you’re setting the dial for us so we’re gonna be doing the Maryland crabcake tour. Get away some Raven scratch offs. I got my 31st anniversary going on this week will be a fade these on Friday with Dan Rodricks on the backside of his incredible stageplay. Last week we saw over Hopkins about city of Baltimore and then next Thursday a rock and roll celebration at Costas and Dundalk with the queen of Dundalk rock and roll. She is shocked from the Go Go’s Rock and Roll Hall of Famer will be with us, as well as a whole bunch thinks about hammer jacks. You know, I knew this guy back when I was running around hammer Jack’s being the Cameron Crowe almost famous guy at the evening sun back in the 80s. He was covering all things Gary land and golf and writing books. And though we love to have him on Chuck bikes, he joins us again after many, many months away sequestered working on a book on David Flaherty and, and it’s basketball season, dude, and you’re at the Balestra, and you’re on my timeline before they throw me off at Twitter. And I’m like, I gotta call John and see how things are at the polestar. Because I started looking at the dates. So Gerardi and I could get there, you know?
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Well, you gotta go to the palestra. Congratulations, Nestor on your wedding anniversary. I’ve been I’ve been married 30 years myself. I
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know it’s radio universe, my wedding.
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Okay, well, not not as much. That’s not 3120 Isn’t that I made it to 18 with my first marriage. I’m on 12 with my second so when he’s pretty good. I’m 20
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right there and I’m 31 on radio, but a lot of different places, but only here for 24 years. I know basketball season and you’ve been through all of this right? Like I mean, I remember back in the 70s getting the old Toyota ACC guide and seeing what’s going on with Duke in North Carolina and that is so not college basketball now, and as a lifer fan as a fly in, I went to the cow senior luncheon back two months ago Willards their Villanova coach, Jay Wright, the whole deal, and they’re talking about this NIHL thing, and I’m literally I’m just the idiot here asking you teach me a little bit. I mean, teach me how to what are the unintended consequences for Towson, and cop and in all of this money that’s going to athletes now?
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8Well, obviously, the big time schools you mentioned Villanova and Maryland, Kentucky, Duke, North Carolina, anybody you want to mention, who is a perennially ranked team, they’ve got lots of alums and lots of boosters with lots of money. And the money is flying around, out of control right now. And really, there’s nothing that can be done to stop them. Because the Supreme Court said that athletes college athletes are entitled to control their name, image and likeness, and IL. And I heard the other day that Oscar to Shivay at Kentucky is making about $6 million this year, to return and play a Kentucky it’s no longer against the rules in any way, shape, or form. And you know, I’ve said this often, in a utopian world, paying players is the right thing to do. But we don’t live in Utopia. And schools like Towson, and Kopan, and UMBC. And anybody else you want to mention who don’t have that kind of money, are, are sort of scraping around trying to find enough money that they can recruit players who can compete in the American east that can compete in the CAA that can compete in, in the NBA say, it is a different world. But the other major issue, Nestor is the transfer portal, because you’ve seen in the last couple of days kid gets benched. He says I’m in the transfer portal, football or basketball or any sport actually
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spoke about this on stage. They were they were thinking of this transfer portal as this purgatory of hell, not as a place where I could go and pluck somebody else’s kid. But there’s always been this perception. I mean, we’re talking about church in this week and Solium in and the best team surgeon had and all that stuff, the transfer thing has been going on. And it’s it used to be like some sort of scarlet letter and yeah, like, I don’t know what college but I’m just really trying to reassess my level of involvement and my intellect forward. Because I used to know that were bags of money, and I didn’t want to know lalala. I don’t want to know there
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were bags of money. And I you know, the biggest difference now is that players are being paid over the table rather than under the table because the rules no longer prohibited. But the transfer portal, obviously, transfers have been around forever. But it used to be that you had to sit out a year to transfer you mentioned Rashid sulamani. at Maryland, he had graduated from college, so he could play right away. That was how the rules started in this direction. They said, Okay, if you have a degree, and you have eligibility left, you can transfer and play right away. But then the transfer portal was completely out Open, and a player can literally transfer to MK today and play tomorrow. At his new school, there’s no sit out rule. And we’re looking at situations where players are transferring once, twice, three times, we’re looking at situations where players are being recruited by other schools to because the remember the Condoleezza Rice committee that Mark Emmert put together after all the scandals involving Penn State and other places, we’re going to come up with a bunch of rules that are going to fix college athletics. Well, one of their brilliant recommendations was to allow players to be involved with agents as early as high school. So now college players, anybody who’s a college player of any note who’s got a chance to make money, they all have agents, and the agents, because there’s such great guys. They got kids playing, let’s say at Towson, and he’s he’s good. So what happens is, they go to a higher level program and say, okay, Nestor Aparicio, is averaging 22, a game at Towson. How much can you get him in is if he transfers next semester, then they go back to Pat scary and say, unless you come up with X dollars in NIH tells Nestor is going to transfer next semester. I mean, it’s, it’s a completely professional situation. And yet you still have all these administrators running around saying, We want excuse me, Nestor, we want to do what’s best for the student athlete. Well, that’s there are no student athletes anymore. That
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ca that really cared about any of that. I mean, who was well
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cared about was image. You know, that’s why they would always throw the student athletes hang out at us all the time. Oh, so and so the nesters a student athlete? Well, first of all, it’s redundant. By rule, you have to be a student, in order to be a college athlete, that’s just a rule. But the but they used it as an hypocrisy, to say, Oh, look, you remember those that you’ve seen those NCAA commercials, where the kid the swimmer jumps out of the water and starts playing the violin? Because they’re student athletes, and they do all these wonderful things. That’s a bunch of hooey. We know that, especially with a one and done rule in basketball, where the top recruits are just looking for the door. Now that rule is going to go away in the next collective bargaining agreement next year, fortunately, and we’ll go back to having guys like LeBron James, and Kobe Bryant, who are great players coming out of high school goes straight to the NBA and why the heck not? You know, I mean, I always said years ago, that when I was in college, if the Washington Post did come to me and said, We think you’re the next great sports writer, and we’re gonna pay you $100,000 a year, which was like a million a year back in back in those days, I never would have graduated, and who cares if I’m making that kind of money. And so it’ll be better. But it’s the Wild West. Now, Nestor, it just is, well, that’s
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what I called it. And I, you have done nothing in the last nine minutes John Fox did to make me feel any more at ease or at home or more aligned with Carpenter, UNBC, or Towson, or the local schools that I’ve been going in watching play ball for as you have been for years as well. Like, I don’t know what it means. Does it mean that they’re going to get $5,000 in free pizza off campus? I mean, is that what it means in some it Saulsbury and some of these places?
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Yeah, I’m, in fact, who I was talking to a low mid major coach a couple of weeks ago, and I said, What are your ni ELLs look like? And he said, Well, we have a deal with Chick fil A. You can’t eat. You can’t eat them on Sunday. Right? Yes. Go to McDonald’s on Sunday.
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8All right. So look, college basketball season, and Maryland. And the start that they’ve gotten off to win. I do want to air this through the holiday a little bit, promote your book and stuff. And we’ll talk a little Army Navy. I know, that’s going on as well, not in Baltimore. But in in the case of college basketball season here. And getting into it and feeling it. Maryland is on to like another page, right? And unlike a lot of these places, there’s only been a couple of pages here. You know, there’s been some Chazelle there has been a little minute and a half away. There been a lot of Gary, and then the church and thing, which is this maligned thing over the last decade and moving into the big 10 and all of that. This guy feels like he has some temperament for this. I mean, just in the early part, I only watched from the outside. I’ve only met him once. I’m not at the press conferences. It feels like he’s ready to take on the wild wild west in a way they carry and lefty and Jonathan, none of those guys would have Cesky none of those guys won’t be part of this.
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Yeah, well, you’re right. And that’s why we see a lot of coaches retiring, very successful coaches. Chesky Jay Wright, Roy Williams, come to mind right away. They didn’t really want to be part of this wild wild west we’re talking about, but Kevin’s younger. He is the son of a coach, a very good coach Ralph Willard, and he was in the Big East Before he came here, so he knows what it’s like to coach in it in a high intensity league both in terms of recruiting and will see with recruiting and in terms of the games, and you know, the Maryland fans are all excited because they hated church it. I mean, Mark just never connected with Maryland’s fans, even when he was having success. They weren’t that was to me. Uh, you know, there are a lot of reasons. I mean, first of all, you mentioned lefty and Gary, those are tough acts to follow in terms of personality. They’re unique. There was nobody like lefty, and very few people brought the kind of intensity to the game as Gary did. I mean, Gary was intense, having breakfast. I mean, I’ve had breakfast with him. He’s intense. And Mark, Mark doesn’t come across that way mark, as a competitor, Mark wants to win. Mark knows how to win. He’s a very good coach. But in this market, which is Washington, which is very much a professional market, so it was Baltimore. I mean, Baltimore has the ravens, and it has the Orioles. Washington has professional teams in all four major sports. And so they treat the top college teams almost like professional teams in terms of performance. I mean, Georgetown is at the point Nesta where next week, they’re gonna give away tickets to a game against St. John’s not a game against St. Leo’s, a big east game because they’re so bad and they’re so desperate, Maryland. Mark had success. But he didn’t win a national championship. He didn’t go to the Final Four people. Maryland people will tell you will tweet me and say, Well, Mark had a great regular season record, but he was terrible in postseason. Well, he wasn’t terrible. He just wasn’t great. And I remember going back to the turn of the century, when I had Maryland people saying I we need to move on from Gary’s just a sweet 16 Coach, quote, Justice sweet 16. Coach sweet 16 is pretty good. But I think Kevin is more intense on the court. The fans like see that and they like the eight no start and they’ve had a couple of impressive wins beating St. Louis in Miami. Up in Connecticut was impressive and winning the big big 10 opener against the good Illinois team was impressive. It wasn’t home. But I think I think Maryland people did not treat Mark church and well, but they’ve got I think they’ve got a good coach in place now and Kevin Waller
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I love talking to you, John, because I mean, you’ve been through all of the wars here right? You remember when the Orioles were a big deal? They weren’t remember when the nationals were a pipe dream. And now they’re not you remember when the capitals pack them in a couple of different times. And in the
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Catskill PacMan. Yeah. And you know,
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this coming and going with the Ravens have tons of empty seats. The Washington football team is just a complete disaster that I mean, that’s its own, you and I could do hours on that over coffee one morning, right? But just how sports changes and how you’re, you’re always looking for that new thing and where the Terps are. They sold a lot of tickets last week, people were there. It’s New Kids on Campus, they may suck an old guy like me or an old guy like you in when they are interesting. And maybe I will get my car go back down there because I want to see the newspaper and the shake and the you sock and I want to relive all of that. But after the play trying to put people together again, that’s one of the reasons I want to go to the plaster I want to go do some things I’ve never done
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Nestor DC fans more so than Baltimore fans, DC fans are among the greatest front runners effort. That’s why I mentioned the hockey team does continue to pack on it because they sell out whether they’re really really good or what they are right now, which isn’t really really good. The Wizards you know, the hardest part of wizards ticket is trying to get out of the arena most nights rather than getting in. And you’ve seen that and now the football team Washington football team, Dan Snyder’s the worst donor in the history of sports. And if I were had been a fan of that team, I wouldn’t go to that stadium anyway, it’s a dump. And it kind of ticks me off that Army Navy is gonna go back there rather than go to m&t Bank Stadium in the next five years. It’s just a stupid decision. But when when Maryland’s winning, people show up when George counts winning people show up because they want to be they want to be I’m a fan of this team. Well be a fan of the team when they’re not winning. And then I’ll be more impressed.
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John, I know your time short here, a golf book. 30 Give me dates. Give me all of that. And then when I take a golf because it’s 20 degrees outside, you’re always thinking gold.
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8Well as a reporter, I am. David charities a unique character. The title of the book is very clever. It’s fairly like his TV show. He grew up in the Troubles in Northern Ireland. He’s a remarkable person he’s lived through great tragedy lost a son to a drug overdose. He has an amazing sense of humor. He he he and Jim Valvano are the two funniest people I’ve ever met. And this book is historic. And it’ll come out late May early June in time for Father’s Day and for the USO.
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All right, I’ll bother you before these aliens in maybe rub elbows with you over at UMBC at some point or at a
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football game BC anymore. Not doing UMBC anymore Nestor but I’m sure we’ll run into each other
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next time you go to the cholesterol drive and we’ll get cheese steaks and pretzels. We’ll do it all bright but I got it. Is there anything else I gotta get to that I that I haven’t gotten
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even while you’ve been Army Navy right? When it was in Baltimore you got to go to the palaestra my three favorite college basketball arenas are the palaestra Cameron Indoor Stadium Allen Fieldhouse, I don’t know if you’ve done all or any of those three
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Allen haven’t done Cameron but I love to Purdue I love Mackay I thought
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Mackay is is is a terrific place to media seating sucks like in most of the big 10 But, but it’s but it is it’s a fun arena if you’re talking about other big 10 arenas. Michigan State is a terrific place to see a game that’d be my favorite big 10 Arena. All right, well
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8now the chirps are back on the radar with new coaching and leadership. I got to think about spending a night in February in Iowa or something like that John, I appreciate you good luck with the book enjoying your holidays enjoys all that all the hoops in your doing and I’m sure it’s Maryland gets better. We’ll see you courtside over there a little bit too. So it’ll be it’ll be good.
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Seating sucks there to master. So don’t hold your breath.
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So when you can see the game better on TV you stay home is Yeah, I don’t
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have to drive. I don’t have to worry about parking. I don’t have to worry about traffic. I don’t have to worry about having an obstructed view seat, which is where the media seating is. I told Mark Turgeon that a few years ago, because he asked me why I didn’t come to more games. And I told him and he said, Well, what if I got your ticket right behind our bench? I said Mark, you think I want to sit with your fans? And he said yeah, good point. Hey, man, take care of yourself. Have a great day. All right. All right, you too. Happy holidays.
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You got to jump on it. join him out on Twitter, buy his books. I’ve got a dozen of them in the back here and follow his work as we examine the wild wild west of the new NIHL I am Nestor we are wn St. Am 5070 Towson Baltimore celebrating 31 years next week with some crab cakes and some rock and roll. We are Baltimore positive.com
