UTC Coach Dan Earl
photo by GoMocs.com
A new college basketball season is upon us, and the five-month odyssey toward March Madness begins this week.
I’m personally glad I won’t have to look at the cyborg presence of Purdue’s Zach Edey for the first time in what seems to be forever. But the real question entering this season is can anyone derail what two-time defending champion Dan Hurley is building at UConn?
On a local level, Tennessee fans are left wondering who will become the next Dalton Knecht and will this be the year Rick Barnes takes the Volunteers to their first Final Four? The UTC Mocs return the dynamic tandem of Trey Bonham and Honor Huff, but blowing a 20-point lead in last year’s SoCon semifinals still stings as Dan Earl enters his third season at the helm.
Maybe it’s just a sign that I’m getting long in the tooth, but I miss the old days of college basketball before Name, Image and Likeness and the transfer portal. Sure, it allowed the Vols to enjoy Knecht on a one-year rental, but it also cost the Mocs the services of post player Sam Alexis to Florida after only two seasons.
Stop and think about this: within the past three years, the game has lost coaching icons such as Mike Krzyzewski at Duke, Roy Williams at North Carolina, Syracuse’s Jim Boeheim and Jay Wright of Villanova. All won national championships during their tenure before departing largely because the amateur model where they built their success has been demolished.
The most recent casualty was Virginia coach Tony Bennett, who walked away last month just weeks before the start of this season. Once again, the current landscape was too much for the highly-respected Bennett.
“I realized I’m no longer the best coach to lead this program in this current environment,” Bennett said at his retirement announcement. “And if you’re going to do it, you’ve got to be all in. You’ve got to have everything. I think I was equipped to do the job here the old way. That’s who I am, and that’s how it was.”
Gone are the days of loyalty to a school and roster stability that allows the development of team culture. We’re now in an era of instant gratification where the student athletes hold all the cards, a sport now governed by free agency on an annual basis with no repercussions.
Let’s be clear – I have no qualms with players being compensated at some level given the fact the NCAA and its member schools have profited handsomely from their services for decades. Some quibble about the fact they’re receiving a free education, but let’s be honest – the post-COVID opening of Pandora’s box on transferring with no penalty combined with the advent of NIL has rendered the toothless NCAA’s ability to govern into an exercise of futility.
The pressures of the new paradigm are felt even more at mid-major programs like Chattanooga. With an NIL bucket that is limited, it creates additional challenges for Earl and his staff.
“The biggest thing is that there's no rules or regulations you would have in a professional model, which I’m not saying would be the best thing,” Earl said. “I don't think there's a good answer, and that's what we're all trying to navigate right now. If you're running the Los Angeles Lakers, you know you have LeBron James for X number of years. If you're trying to build a culture and a program, install offense or defensive concepts, you know what to expect. Right now, we're living in total free agency every year, and you want kids to be making the best decisions for their future.
“I don’t want to get too philosophical, but we care about the kids, and you don't want to see them make a mistake just chasing short term a few dollars. It's not for me to decide what's best for that young individual or their family. But a lot of that's gone away with trying to help a young guy, and you see some mistakes made.”
The constant roster shuffling creates difficulty in creating continuity and building culture. No members of UTC’s 2024-25 team were on the active roster two years ago, and only three players – Bonham, Huff and sophomore Noah Melson – saw meaningful playing time last season. The addition of a quartet of fifth-year performers who spent four seasons at their previous stop lends some experience, but blending their talents over a short period can be imposing.
“It’s hard because you care for these kids when they're in your program, and this can create a tension,” Earl said. “I would love to grow this program and go to NCAA Tournaments and see guys get better. And I believe we can do all that stuff, even within this newfound world. But you also understand that they can make some money and they can go other places. You just want to be protective about who’s giving them advice. I can argue both sides. You hope they trust you enough that they would listen to you knowing you have their best interest.”
The current model has shifted the balance of power in favor of the players and those programs with deep NIL pockets. It has created a situation where coaches must re-recruit members of their current roster on an annual basis.
“It used to be when a kid came in for an end of the year meeting, we’d discuss how to get better, off-season workouts and our vision for the program,” Earl said. “But now, the new normal is when you have those meetings you almost start off with, ‘Hey, where are you at? What are you thinking as far as staying or leaving?’
“It’s hard for kids if they don't have instant success, so they decide to bounce to someplace they think is better. A lot of us know in life that you're going to have failures or down times, and part of the way you become successful is persevering through a tough game, or a coach yelled at me, or a slump, or we lost some games. I worry that some of that is going away and it's not the best for everybody involved, particularly the players.”
Earl is sympathetic to the quandary facing today’s generation of players, where financial promises and the allure of a bigger spotlight can be attractive in an era of instant gratification without thinking through the bigger picture.
“These are young adults, and with young adults sometimes mistakes are made,” Earl said. “You want to give them the best advice and see them be successful. There's a lot of money out there. If a kid's going to make a move for that, you just want to make sure they’re being told the truth. I worry about UTC basketball creating a program and trying to get high character guys, but you worry about their future as well, who's going to be around them and who they listen to.”
With Earl spending seven years coaching at VMI prior to his arrival in Chattanooga, he developed a reputation for discovering talented players who flew below the radar of larger schools. Plus, VMI did not accept graduate students and he had to convince his recruits to come play at a military school. Undeterred by the considerable obstacles, Earl was able to land both Huff and Bonham along with Jake Stephens to play for the Keydets.
“At VMI we had to go to AAU tournaments when you're recruiting a high school kid and we would try to evaluate a kid that we thought could play or that you see growth potential once they fill out,” Earl said. “That's the fun of that model. We get involved with higher level kids here at Chattanooga, both evaluating him basketball-wise also what makes them tick.
“The process was doing home visits, seeing them in their environment, go visit them in school, talk to the principal, the teacher, the janitor, the people that surround them and get to know the kid that you're getting so that he is a good fit or not for your culture.”
But the transfer portal has taken away that ability to cultivate relationships, and has turned into a free-for-all environment.
“Today all the timelines have become so compressed,” Earl said. “When a player enters the transfer portal, literally 57 coaches text them within five minutes. There's no finding a kid under the radar because everybody knows his name and are trying to get ahead of each other. Then multiple coaches call them within an hour, and we try to get film on them, but everything's rushed. So, I'm watching film and trying to make a quick decision if we want to bring them in for a visit.”
With the maddening tyranny of the urgent forcing coaching staffs to extend offers based on limited film study and no personal relationship, it creates greater challenges on building a roster.
“I drive my staff nuts because I’ll ask, ‘Did you call his high school? Did you call his college?’ But as you can imagine, it’s so hectic,” Earl said. “I worry for our program because we’re trying to build a culture. I think more mistakes are going to be made, both from an evaluation standpoint if it is a great fit for our program, but also what makes the kid tick and is it a good fit here for him.”
The combination of NIL and the transfer portal has changed the college game and ushered many of the legendary coaches into retirement. Earl is undeterred and will continue to bring talented individuals who represent UTC in a manner that preserves the culture he’s created. I’m thankful for his desire to preserve the integrity of the program, and his willingness to adapt so that both his players’ interests and the legacy of Mocs basketball will not be compromised.
UTC Opens Season Out West
The Mocs open their season on Monday night at Southern Cal, followed by a trip to powerhouse Saint Mary’s on Thursday. The game against the Trojans can be viewed on starting at 10 p.m. on the Big 10 Network and heard locally on WFLI 96.1
UTC’s contest against Saint Mary’s will also be at 10 p.m. and available on ESPN+ as well as radio.
Paul Payne can be emailed at paulpayne6249@gmail.com
Paul Payne
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