With the inclusion of NIL and the transfer portal, the face of college sports has changed a lot in recent years. But do former college athletes ever think about what their careers might have looked like if they had those rules in their college days? During the pregame show for Saturday night’s NCAA Tournament game between UCLA and Tennessee, Clark Kellogg, Kenny Smith and Charles Barkley discussed that very issue.
Ernie Johnson got the ball rolling.
“Here are three guys who played college basketball,” he said. “Do you ever think now about, ‘Man, if they had NIL and a transfer portal when you were playing,’ do you allow yourself to think on those terms at all?
“I don’t,” Kellogg said. “I don’t. Yesterday’s a closing door. I don’t live there anymore. So I don’t think about what could have been. The guys that came before me, they had disadvantages that I didn’t have. I never go there.”
Smith ultimately believed that his college career would not have been different with the transfer portal. That said, he also disagreed with Kellogg’s views on never looking back.
“Yesterday’s a door but I look through it every now and then,” Smith said. “For me, my whole thought process was always, I loved schools with tradition. So, North Carolina stuck out for me based on tradition. I am kind of a loyalist. So I am a person that, I probably would have never jumped in the portal. Because, the reason I went to North Carolina, because I felt that I couldn’t play there. And I wanted to prove to myself that I could — and I started as a freshman. At that time, that was unheard of. I had to prove to myself, so I would have stayed.”
Barkley largely echoed Kellogg’s point. While acknowledging that, of course, there is more money in both college and the NBA today than there was during his playing days, he also noted how much better he had it than the greats who came before him.
“Obviously everybody thinks about the money in college and sports,” Barkley said. “We’re not jealous. We’re happy for these kids. Definitely happy for the guys in the NBA. But I will say this. Man, we’re all so lucky. Like, all three of us had great NBA careers. We made more money than Wilt Chamberlain. We can’t carry Wilt Chamberlain’s jock. We made more money than Bill Russell, we can’t carry his jock. So, you can’t think — like, bless these players. Bless the NBA players. Now, these guys are definitely born at the right time. But you know what? We did alright.”
It’s hard to apply modern rules and sensibilities, especially when their playing careers were so long ago. Kellogg was at Ohio State from 1979-1982, Barkley was at Auburn from 1981-1984 and Smith was at North Carolina from 1983-1987. Might things have been different with NIL and a transfer portal? Maybe, particularly since anyone who’s seen Back to the Future knows that one thing going different in the past could vastly change the future. That said, Barkley has the right attitude.
There may be some former athletes who would be understandably bitter about the eras they played in. But Kellogg, Barkley and Smith all had successful college careers and were taken in the first eight picks of their respective NBA Drafts. All things considered, Barkley is right. Things worked out well.