Rick Barnes on NIL: 'People don't realize it stands for now it's legal'
The NCAA Transfer Portal forever changed college athletics. Look no further than Tennessee Basketball six months ago. Coming off an Elite Eight run, the Vols lost four players to the portal and had to add four new faces to rebuild a new-look roster.
But don’t mistake NIL and players getting paid for their name, image and likeness as anything new on the landscape.
“People don’t really realize that the NIL has been around for a long, long time,” Tennessee coach Rick Barnes said Monday while speaking at the Knoxville Quarterback Club. “People don’t realize it stands for now it’s legal.”
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Barnes joked about the true meaning NIL after being asked during his speaking engagement about players being paid. How does it work? Are head coaches aware of how much players are making? How active is a coaching staff in that area?
“The (player’s) agent talks to the collective,” Barnes said, “and they talk about it. We obviously will have to know what (the money) would be because we’ve got to go build a roster. And we’ve worked really hard.”
Barnes described it as an “NBA model” being the approach.
“Their deal is they know they’re going to have to pay three people, maybe four … a pretty good chunk of money,” Barnes said. “And then what’s the best value they can get for everything else? That’s what they got to (do), because those to me are the real big decisions.
“That’s where you really, you don’t want to miss. But it’s part of the equation now we have to deal with it. But we know we have to build a roster and manage a roster.”
Tennessee lost junior center Jonas Aidoo and sophomore power forward Tobe Awaka to the transfer portal on back-to-back days in April. Redshirt freshmen Freddie Dilione V and DJ Jefferson left the program, too.
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Aidoo landed at Arkansas and Awaka is at Arizona. Dilione went to Penn State and Jefferson to Longwood.
Rick Barnes: ‘We want you to want to come to Tennessee for all the right reasons’
In their place, Barnes and his staff went into the portal to add Hofstra wing Darlinstone Dubar, Charlotte stretch forward Igor Milicic Jr., Ohio State center Felix Okpara and North Florida guard Chaz Lanier.
“I always talk about roster building,” Barnes said, “but now it’s more management of it.”
And even with the changes the portal and the NIL era have brought, Barnes isn’t getting away from the most fundamental part of the way he recruits.
“We can’t get away from our core values, who we’re about,” Barnes said. “We tell every recruit that we talk to that we don’t want to be about the money.
“We want you to want to come to Tennessee for all the right reasons. And then we get to that part (money), we can talk about it.
“But we want you to want to be here for what we talked about,” Barnes added, “how we recruit you. And that’s got to work first or the other part won’t work.”
