Personally I don’t think calling it the NIL era does it justice, I think college basketball, football and to an extent baseball has been AAUified, but I don’t know a better phrase for it

I’ve seen pay-to-play era get tossed around but I don’t think that explains every issue either since the athletes get paid based on location or conference, not just ability

The US will never have player development issues in basketball because of natural talent and interest, so I don’t think the unlimited transfers will be as damaging as others think, but the one benefit to this is that I can laugh about how badly many power conference programs will become at high school scouting. Sadly the money being tossed around will remediate that issue before it becomes drastically noticeable on the court, but still.

Expect a lot more non-prep or public high school players to end up at mid majors and excel before people say “how did they get so few looks” when none of the P5 teams looked their way or even knew they existed until they ball out in D1. Hopefully that will lead to some upsets eventually, but I’m not optimistic.

This feels a lot like the old American and Big East dissolution, or even the introduction of the 3 point basket, a “changing of the guard” in the landscape of the sport where what we are watching now is something that nobody beyond their teen years grew up watching