Prime Time Raids the Transfer Portal

It will never be the same.

We guessed it would be this way. The minute the transfer portal doors swung open like the entrance to a Dodge City saloon, we guessed that chaos would follow. It has, led by the perfect cowboy. The one wearing the 10-gallon hat around Boulder, CO. Deion Sanders looks great in that hat, as good as John Dutton ever has in the TV show Yellowstone.

(In fact, Deion and Kevin Costner ought to have a Hat-Off sometime soon. I’d pay to watch that. Yippie-ky-yay, sodbusters.)

Leave it to Prime to show the world what the landscape can look like when 19-year-olds are free to make choices and money. Sanders isn’t just using the portal. He’s riding it like a mustang on a four-day drive.

From the Twitter feed of ESPN reporter Bill Connelly:

By my count, Colorado's now lost all 4 QBs who threw >20 passes, 3 of 5 RBs, all 9 players targeted >8 times, 5 of 8 OLs and 7 of 8 DLs with >100 snaps, all 4 LBs with >200 snaps, and 12 of 17 DBs with ANY snaps.

Then this, from Yahoo! Monday:

More than 40 players from last year’s Colorado team have entered the transfer portal. The second transfer portal window opened April 15, and nearly 30 Buffs have entered the portal in the time since. Of that group of transfers, 18 players opted to transfer since the conclusion of Saturday’s spring game at Folsom Field.

Sanders didn’t just predict this would happen. He all but spray-painted it on the walls of the Flatiron Range looming in Boulder’s midst. Here’s what Deion said when Colorado hired him as its football coach after last year’s 1-11 season:

“We’ve got a few positions already taken care of because I’m bringing my luggage with me,” Sanders said at the time. “And it’s Louis (Vuitton). I’m coming. It ain’t going to be no more of this mess that these wonderful fans, this student body, and some of your parents have put up with for probably two decades now. I’m coming. And when I get here, there’s going to be change.

"So I want y’all to get ready to go ahead and jump in that portal. Do whatever you’re going to get. Because the more of you who jump in, the more room you make.’’

This is how the game is played now.

Do we love this, hate this or are we simply unsure about this?

Here is a coach, playing by the new rules designed to promote anarchy, promoting anarchy. By all appearances, he’s being full-frontal honest about it. And truly, Colorado football needed it. Has for some time, in fact.

But is it too. . . too. . . brazen?

In playing by the new rules, is Sanders obliterating the old ones?

You’d have to say yes, he is.

Certainly, any notion of amateurism, quasi and otherwise, is becoming quainter by the second. These are business-kids, not student-athletes. Their loyalty is to themselves. You will still cheer for UC or UK or X, but you won’t do it believing the players you’re watching have much, if any, connection to your favored school. Should that matter?

Sanders is showing how a college team can be rebuilt from the studs in one offseason of construction. OK, but if you are even remotely concerned with what 19-year-olds are learning about themselves and the world, maybe it gives you pause.

Sanders doesn’t care about players as people. He cares only about what they can do for him. Conversely, players don’t care about him, either, unless they believe he can make them money. Maybe that’s not markedly different from the way it was back in the Stone Age of five years ago. It’s certainly more in your face.

And we haven’t even talked about NIL money. There is no accountability with any of that. Schools partner with “collectives’’ whose job is to raise cash to pay players. Are collectives accountable to schools? They don’t seem to be. Does the public know how players just happen to show up on campus, or leave? Nope.

Is a kid-capitalist’s new-found freedom a good thing? Hell, yeah, if you’re the kid. Freedom is never bad. But it comes with choices and responsibilities never before encountered. It’s easy to see a generation of job-hopping hoopers, accepting the highest bids, playing at four schools in five years. Nothing much learned about teamwork, camaraderie or the appreciation for building something from the ground floor.

Have ball, will travel.

Seemingly, the new era will be great for, say, Xavier basketball. Under the old system, Sean Miller would be starting from near-scratch this offseason, doing the heavy lifting of signing high school kids to scholarships. Now? He has full access to Transfer-Mart and XU’s (unspecified) war chest to entice kids. Xavier lost most of its team. It won’t matter the way it used to.

Is Deion’s success a win for the cult of personality? Jackson State is light years from the Pac-12. Success at the former doesn’t guarantee success at the latter. Regardless, Sanders is in prime time. The future’s uncertain, but the end is always near.

In comes Louis Vuitton riding in to save. . . something. Wearing his best Stetson.

Now, then. . .

Wayne Krivsky

AN OLD PAL CALLED ME MONDAY. . . Wayne Krivsky wanted to say hello and to ask me if I’d softened my stance re My (Erstwhile) Pirates Who (Still) Suck. The Battlin’ Buccos are in 1st place in the NL Central and own the NL’s best record. There is no bigger mirage west of the Sahara Desert than the 16-7 Pittsburgh Pirates.

I ditched them several years ago, when they dealt their 3 finest prospects — Austin Meadows, Tyler Glasnow, Shane Baz — for Chris Archer.

“No,’’ I said. “Let me amend that. Hell, no.’’

Wayne has lived in Vegas for several years. After Bob Castellini fired him in 2008, 21 games into his third season as Reds GM — to make room for Walt Jocketty — Krivsky became a scout for the Mets and then worked in the front offices in Washington and Minnesota.

(That was also when Castellini offered this now-infamous statement, "We've just come to a point where we're not going to lose anymore.’’)

Wayne did good work here. Jocketty helped Castellini win quickly, while Krivsky saw the Reds as a longer-term project. He traded Wily Mo Pena for Bronson Arroyo, acquired Brandon Phillips for bus riders and found Josh Hamilton via the Rule 5 draft.

Far more importantly, Krivsky’s scout-draft-sign-develop philosophy was in tune with the small-money realities of MLB in Cincinnati. Or should have been. Now, the Reds are doing things the way Wayne Krivsky was trying to do them nearly two decades ago.

There is irony in that, and it is painful.

GET YER KLEENEX. . . WCPO last week did a feature on my son-in-law, Ryan Mavriplis, who just happens to be the head manager of the NKU baseball team. It’s the 2nd-best thing he does, after being married to Jillian The Magnificent.

The coach who hired Ryan, Dizzy Peyton, is a walking reason to love college sports, no matter what. When it comes to virtuous ideals, Diz walks the walk. As with every human transaction Ryan enters into, both parties emerge better for the deal.

People who ignore the value in embracing people different from them miss out on a reason we’re all here in the world.

Ckout the video.

TUNE O’ THE DAY. . . A true gem, a wonderful 1-hit wonder by a group that spawned the career of Todd Rundgren, who’s going to be touring the world with Darryl Hall this summer. Not around here, unfortunately.

And when we’re through with you/

We’ll get me one, too.