Louisville head football coach Scott Satterfield has accused Alabama of tampering—contacting former Cardinals wide receiver Tyler Harrell and encouraging him to enter the transfer portal before he made his decision to do so. It’s a bit of a he-said/he-said situation, and Satterfield isn’t the kind of guy whose word you treat as ironclad by any stretch (remember that whole South Carolina saga with him?), but tampering is one of the few actually interesting things about the current transfer portal situation (great interview from Mike Brey yesterday, by the way: “Everybody should just shut up and adjust.”), so we’re going to talk a little bit about tampering (sorry for all the parentheticals I promise I’m done now).
The most important thing about tampering and the transfer portal is the same as the most important thing concerning NIL deals that are really just pay-for-play: The NCAA has no way to effectively enforce rules in this arena. There are somewhere around 550 schools with at least one Division I sport, there are somewhere around 200,000 Division I athletes, there are even more in the picture when you include those considering transferring to Division I programs from non-Division I schools, the NCAA does not have the financial or human resources to handle “tampering,” something that could include things as simple as a player texting his or her former high school teammate and telling them they think there’s an open roster spot for them on said player’s team. The NCAA doesn’t have the financial or human resources to effectively enforce the rules they already have in place—as evidenced by them not enforcing them. There’s no way they can handle something as massive as tampering.
What’s the solution then? It gets a big reaction, but the solution is to ignore tampering at the NCAA level. If schools really want tampering rules, and want them enforced, they need to go through their conferences and their conferences need to ally with other conferences to make those happen. The NCAA simply cannot do it. Will conferences effectively do it? It’s doubtful at a national level, since forming an alliance between every conference leads to you reverse engineering that piece of the NCAA, but it’s not inconceivable that the Power Five and the Big East could make an anti-tampering pact and work with existing arbitration services to enforce said pact. In this hypothetical setup, if Scott Satterfield thinks Nick Saban’s program tampered, Louisville can compile their evidence and bring it to arbitration. Again, though, that gets a big reaction: What about smaller-brand schools?
The thing about tampering is that it takes time. If it’s going to be a concerted effort, it takes time. It takes money. It takes dedicated staff. Every minute an Alabama recruiter spends targeting Tyler Harrell is one that same recruiter does not spend on the high school trail, and while it might be more valuable to spend that time on Harrell, there is eventually a point of diminishing returns, one that’s actually reached rather quickly when you compare the present and future value of Alabama’s average freshman class with that of Louisville’s average roster. And Louisville’s not a bad program.
So much time is spent trying to design complicated rules that make a system perfect. This is a human thing, but the desire is on full display with this. There is a massive push within and around college sports right now for “regulation.” To which we say: What the fuck is regulation? How are you going to regulate this? Who is going to do it? The NCAA, which famously recently let UNC walk free for creating fake classes then gave Oklahoma State a postseason ban because a former assistant coach accepted bribes to steer players towards specific agents and financial advisors?
It’s fair to lament that the current system is a mess. Systems are messy. But they work themselves out. They find stasis. Your body recovers after you drink eight beers. Silt settles after water is shaken. Brexit happened, and the islands of Great Britain did not sink into the sea. Shocks can be good or bad, but systems do eventually find equilibrium, and the same will be true with transfers and NIL and tampering and all of it. Could effective regulation speed up the process? Definitely. But effective regulation is not going to happen in college sports. You’re more likely to convince Tyler Harrell to go back to Louisville than you are to get effective regulation from the NCAA. On just about anything. And the risk with ineffective regulation is that you get an unnatural equilibrium—one that cannot hold. If you outlaw tampering at the NCAA level, teams will still tamper, and with the guise of regulation and the impersonation of enforcement, it will be a lot harder to find a system that actually works. You’ll be locked into one that pretends to work.
So, as with all this stuff: Let it play out. Give it a couple years. Attempted, ineffectual top-down regulation is how we got to the point where recent changes have been such a big shock in the first place. For God’s sake: Learn.
You Want Transfer News?
For any anti-portal folks in the room, I now feel a little bit like the middle schoolers making Brennan and Dale lick the white dog shit, but we have five-star transfer news, and you’re going to lick it:
- Khalil Shabazz is staying at San Francisco.
- D.J. Burns is going to NC State.
There, that wasn’t that bad, right? Hardly even tasted it. Burns moves up from Winthrop, following the American Dream of self-advancement. Shabazz decides San Francisco is the best place for him. Regulate that.
Yes, Reid Detmers Was Dominant
Angels rookie (and top prospect entering the season, per FanGraphs) Reid Detmers threw a no-hitter last night despite only striking out two batters. Which, if we’re going to be statistical pedants, opens the question of whether Detmers was good or lucky.
Detmers was definitely lucky. You have to be, to throw a no-hitter. According to Statcast’s xBA—the likelihood of each batted ball turning into a hit—the assortment of contact Detmers induced had just a 1-in-22,197 probability of resulting in zero hits. But he was also good. The hardest-hit balls he allowed were on the ground and high in the air. The contact most likely to turn into hits was a pair of bloopers. Detmers got through nine innings on 108 pitches. He walked only one batter. Compared to the Mets’ combined no-hitter a week and a half ago, in which they struck out twelve batters, Detmers was 99.75% less likely to get the no-no (the Mets’ no-hitter probability, based on that game’s contact, was 1-in-54), but the Mets also allowed a run. The Mets also granted six walks. The expected number of baserunners given Detmers’s xBAs and walks was 7.15. That of the Mets was 8.85.
Again, this is pedantry from the get-go. Detmers threw a no-hitter, and no matter the recipe, that’s an incredible accomplishment for him, personally. But it was also a damn good game. Sometimes, the pedants obscure that, and that’s not something we want to do.
In related news, the Angels are rocking. Second-best record in the American League, tied for the most wins in baseball, a game up on the Astros who have won eight straight and are very, very good. Per FanGraphs, we’re 80% likely to see Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani’s team in the postseason, and if everything goes chalk from here, we’ll see them play three games against the Blue Jays, which is about the most fun series I can imagine. Great stuff in Anaheim.
The Cubs Showed Some Life
I want to hug Frank Schwindel. That poor man. Towering fly ball caught on the warning track that would have been a go-ahead grand slam if MLB hadn’t deadened the balls. Obviously, that at-bat doesn’t exist in a vacuum, but the point is, can it get more frustrating than that?
It appears that Schwindel is with the big-league club to stay, especially with Nick Madrigal and Michael Hermosillo now going on the injured list (Ildemaro Vargas was added to the 40-man, Adrian Sampson was D’dFA). Madrigal’s injury is lower-back tightness, which leads my non-medically-educated speculation to wonder if it’s related to his hamstring injury from last year, but the fact of the matter is that Schwindel is a Major League baseball player for the Cubs for the foreseeable future, and David Ross is treating him like one, and after the silliness Sunday and Monday, that’s the only way forward. Hopefully Schwindel turns it around. Love that guy.
In other Cubs news, Wade Miley was bad last night and Ed Howard is hurt. Howard’s injury looked very painful—he collided with the opposing first baseman trying to beat out a ground ball and came up unable to put weight on his left leg, pointing at his hip—and he’s going immediately to the IL, which is bad news for an exciting top prospect no matter how long it is, but hopefully isn’t especially bad news (I can still picture Corey Patterson tearing his ACL against the Cardinals in 2002, making plays at first especially fraught for my memories). Miley just walked a ton of guys and fell apart after getting the first two batters out in the third.
In happier territory, Nico Hoerner looked incredible defensively last night at shortstop, and while looks can be deceiving when it comes to defensive performance (Derek Jeter built a big brand off of this phenomenon), Statcast has him in the 99th percentile of Outs Above Average and he’s third in the Majors in FanGraphs’s defensive impact rating, suggesting Hoerner is, indeed, really freaking good. Pair that with an above-average xwOBA and you’ve got a good shortstop who is still 24 years old for another two days and has graded out as your franchise’s top prospect in the past, indicating less than a flash in the pan. It’s very early in the season, but Nico Hoerner may be writing himself back into the central plans of the Cubs’ future core.
Day game today, Keegan Thompson gets the start, Seiya Suzuki’s still on the bench with that ankle soreness, but he did pinch hit last night. With Thompson, it’s probably time to have him start. For a while, he was so dominant in relief that there was meat on the bone with the argument that you shouldn’t mess with a good thing by altering his role at all, but his last outing wasn’t impeccable, so now I think you can get away with trying it out, especially with the rotation so thin at the moment.
Road Wins, Home Wins
On the ice, home favorites won in the East while road underdogs won in the West, putting the Kings one home win away from a surprising trip to the conference semi’s, the Blues one home win away from an unexpected trip to the conference semi’s, and the Hurricanes and Maple Leafs holding onto home-ice advantage as they try to close their respective series out on the road tomorrow night.
Tonight, we’ve got the Penguins looking to win the thing in five at Madison Square Garden as well as Game 5 in two 2-2 series between the Washington/Florida one and the Dallas/Calgary one. The way this effectively comes out is that the Capitals and Stars have each shortened the series by winning two of the first four games, so while they lack home-ice advantage there’s higher randomness in the smaller sample. I do not, for whatever it’s worth, know how that comes out when it comes to overall series win probability, because I am a fool and did not keep records of Gelo’s forecasts from last Monday.
Burnt Out?
The Heat and the Suns each swatted their challenger away like flies after rough pairs of road games for each. Firm control of the series, but also one win away from Game 7, which isn’t all that natural for at least my brain to wrap itself around.
The Celtics are a relatively big home favorite in Game 5 of their series with the Bucks tonight, but five and half points still isn’t much. Meanwhile, the Warriors are trying to extinguish the Grizzlies on the road—four-point favorites there, and with Ja Morant out there’s a pretty clear narrative, correct or incorrect, that says this is a take-care-of-business game for Golden State.
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Viewing schedule, today and tonight, second screen rotation in italics:
- 12:35 PM EDT: Blue Jays @ Yankees, Berríos vs. Taillon (Regional TV)
- 3:40 PM EDT: Phillies @ Mariners, Falter vs. Gilbert (Regional TV)
- 4:10 PM EDT: Cubs @ Padres, Thompson vs. Martinez (Regional TV)
- 7:00 PM EDT: Bucks @ Celtics (TNT)
- 7:00 PM EDT: Penguins @ Rangers (ESPN)
- 7:07 PM EDT: Rays @ Angels, McClanahan vs. Ohtani (FS1)
- 7:30 PM EDT: Capitals @ Panthers (ESPN2)
- 9:30 PM EDT: Stars @ Flames (ESPN)
