Colorado coach Tad Boyle isn’t pretending the NIL and transfer portal era has made life easier. If anything, he’s making the case that college basketball has been rebuilt into something far more transactional, and he wants the sport to stop dancing around that reality.
Colorado has lost 15 players to the transfer portal over the last two seasons, a number that cuts directly against the kind of program Boyle has long tried to build as a recruiter and player developer. He said his mindset hasn’t changed, but the environment around him absolutely has.
“We haven’t changed our mindset. The marketplace has changed,” Boyle said.
“You’ve got a budget that you have to deal with within the marketplace. For the first 28 years of my career, we had room and board, tuition fees and books.
And that’s what everyone else had, unless they were cheating, and we know people were cheating. But the ones that weren’t, you were on a level playing field.
Now, there is no level playing field.”
That shift has forced coaches like Boyle to evaluate every roster move through a financial lens. High school prospects and transfer targets alike now come with a price tag attached, and he described each decision as a matter of value.
“Every decision you make, whether it’s with a high school kid or a transfer portal kid, it’s a value proposition,” Boyle said. “Money becomes involved with that decision. So that has been an adjustment, for sure, but it’s not one I’m afraid to make; it’s just that everybody’s got a budget.”
Boyle also pointed to what he sees as one of the biggest problems in the current setup: nobody wants to be fully open about the money. In his view, that lack of transparency leaves everyone guessing, from fans to the people inside the sport.
“I wish the budgets were public and transparent,” Boyle said. “I think that would help everybody, but I’m obviously alone in that feeling.
At least, I haven’t heard anybody else say that that’s what they want. From athletic directors to presidents, to the NCAA, conference commissioners, anybody.”
For Boyle, the issue goes beyond perception. He believes the way NIL is being used creates a distorted picture of what players are actually being paid and how they’re being judged.
“I wish we had more transparency because that way, I could truly be judged and our players could truly be judged based upon what they’re getting paid,” Boyle said. “NIL is not used correctly.
We’re paying these kids to play; that’s the bottom line. You can say what you want … but they’re getting paid to play.
That’s okay. I just wish we’d come out and say it, get some rules around it and some transparency.”
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