Could KU basketball go independent?
Thanks to the NCAA’s new approach to amateurism and compensation—as well as possibly forthcoming sanctions on Kansas’ athletic program—the next ten years of Kansas basketball will look vastly different than the past decade. And while the NCAA has punted putting an athlete compensation rulebook together to the fall, the game’s biggest programs are already trying to get ahead of the curve. Radical times often require radical solutions, especially when there’s an ocean of dough riding on it.
Naturally, I’ve been drumming up some potential pathways of my own. It’s anyone’s guess on how the NCAA will delineate “amateur” from “pro.” So far this offseason, we’ve already seen some of the game’s top prep talents take off for a G League pilot program. A nationwide pandemic with no end in sight could (hypothetically) curtail player movement even further; if no one is actually stepping on campus anytime soon, why would players who were only planning on attending school for a short period of time even bother? (The blue bloods will be fine. There will always be players. It’s the other 300+ D-1 teams I’m worried about.)
As someone who’s always looking at things through crimson-and-blue-Charlie-Hustle-branded sunglasses, I spend a lot of time wondering about what KU’s status could buy them in the open market. Could KU basketball go independent? They’d need a lot of leverage to do so, but in the era where ESPN is airing whatever gets the most ratings (which is more likely to be a Sierra Canyon game than a midseason Auburn-Ole Miss tilt) I could see Kansas rethinking their presence in a conference they have dominated since it was invented. Does KU have [subscribes to LinkedIn Premium] a unique value proposition that other power programs don’t?
On the advice of a friend, I called Larry Keating, who was KU’s scheduling guru under Lew Perkins. Keating—a Long Island native with deep ties to the NYC region—was the man playing Tetris with KU’s schedule during the Perkins era, which is one of the trickiest jobs in the department. If KU was somehow an independent contractor, that job would be a trillion times harder.
My thinking has all the characteristics of a wonky, semi-delusional dreamer, hoping for his favorite program to become an innovator that inspires nationwide jealousy. I needed someone to ground me in reality, but that would also entertain my speculations thoughtfully. Keating was, and is, the man for that job, even though he stifled my unpopular suggestion that KU football move down to the subdivision.
“Not gonna happen,” Keating said.
Earlier this week, Keating and I talked about the path to independence, what KU basketball has that no one else does, and the future of “amateurism.”
I’ll go for it, right from the jump. Football schools like Notre Dame have made a killing being independent. Could a basketball school—say, Kansas—go independent and be better off than they are in a conference? Could it happen?
It’s impossible.
First of all, you can't compare it to Notre Dame or BYU, who has done the same thing. They're the only two independents. In Notre Dame's case, they were independent before they got into a league. They were independent in basketball and the difficulty was getting a schedule.
Football basically has a three- or four-week period in September, maybe five weeks if conference play starts late. If you have to do a 12 game schedule, you can get three or four games in that time period. Then you have eight games left to do well, if you're good. And by the way—you gotta be very good to be able to pull this off you. BYU who has a national profile and they have people that follow them. So they can spot themselves into [other people’s schedules]. But it took BYU a while to get it done.
So Notre Dame did that with the Midwestern City Conference, got into a league for their other sports. They could do that in basketball, because of the name, but their other sports were buried because they had no conference basis to their scheduling. Their name got them in the door but their schedules were all screwed up. They ended up playing bad schools in January and February, in the second half of the season, in all sports, because the bad schools would do anything to play Notre Dame. But the good leagues have conference schedules; unless a date happens to pop up and everyone is full on it, or CBS and says "Let's make a game on X particular day" a year or two in advance.
But in basketball, the critical thing is you gotta schedule 30 games. All of the leagues play January/February conference, although of them are playing two conference games in December because they're trying to play 20 conference games. Your basic problem is that you can't get any of those good games in January and February.
Ok, so if you didn’t have a conference to play in, you’ve had to fill the schedule there. I get that. But what if you just really stacked the non-con and played only top tier programs every single year?
That’s the problem that Gonzaga has. They're the only ones that are in that situation, but what [Mark Few] does is every year he does not play a game non-conference, for the most part, that isn't a top-50, top-25 program. He can't afford to, because the conference does nothing for him.
But, there's only one Gonzaga, and there's only two programs like this in football. And it also takes an AD and a program like Notre Dame and Gonzaga, the AD and coach have been there for 20 years. They've built relationships. They have status where they can go to someone and say "Do us a favor.” But if there's 20 guys out there looking for favors, it ain't gonna happen.
Here’s my thinking: KU has an advantage that the other blue blood markets do not, to some extent. There’s no NBA team closer than OKC, and they’ve only been there since 2008. Having worked there, do you think KU has a unique market advantage over everyone else?
When we go to the Garden, we'd have 5000 people there. We went down to Atlantis [in 2013] the first time to play in their tournament, they were giving 250 tickets to each school, we brought 1700 people. No one has even come close to that. We got to Maui every four years—you'd get 350 tickets into Maui and it's hard to get any others, and we bring sometimes 1500 people down there and they're all at every game. They do amazing things. When we had tickets for the Champions Classic, each of the four schools got basically 25% of the tickets, which might have been about 3500-4000 tickets in the Garden or in Chicago. We would sell out our allotment, and we'd have 6000 people there because 2000 people would find a way to get a ticket. We went to Vegas one year to play in a tournament that had not been anything, and we had 7000 people.
It was the November after Florida won the national championship, and they won it again that year. And we beat them. Billy Donovan came out on the floor and he could not believe it. The place seated probably 7000 people and we probably had 6500. And we sold out of our place about 1500 tickets, which was more than they wanted to give us. And we still had 6500 people. Nobody is like that. It's the most amazing thing.
You ask any of the television guys, whenever Kansas plays and whoever they play, it's the high-rated game. Which is what determines if they take you or not, is whether you can drive ratings. And they can. The fan base is all over the country, and it's more than just the alums (which is big, maybe half a million alums) but there’s what I call a “subway alum.” Kansas is in the middle of the country and kids from California and New York they latch onto the program, I don't know what it is. When they watch their game on television—they've been sold out for 20 years—it's an exciting, great presentation. You're not watching Baylor play with 2000 people in the stands as a number one team in the country. I’ve been around college sports for 50 years and I’ve never seen anything like it.
Another idea I had: you could fill the January/February part of the schedule with exhibitions or high profile games like barnstormers. For instance, I feel like Kansas would be good competition for that G-League incubator team in SoCal, and I bet our players would love to go against those guys. Possible?
Other professionals can play professional teams. College teams can not play professional teams.
But won’t the new compensated players technically be professionals?
Everyone has avoided the definition, as of now. It actually changed a long time ago, but they just didn’t call it that. But now it’s going to be literally selling your abilities. The Olympics dealt with that 30 years ago.
I'm sure at some point, you know, it'll find its way. It's going to change college for good.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.