There are a lot of ways to opt out

Jim Larranaga is no longer Miami’s head basketball coach, the inevitable result of the last year-plus struggle that program has endured. Miami was in the Final Four a couple years back, but after a 4-8 start to this season, with a team clearly dead on arrival, Jim Larranaga is on his way.

He says he’s tired.

Here Larranaga laments a bunch of guys off his Final Four team—which ranked 328th in bench minutes, it was a thin team—deciding to play elsewhere. Miami still managed to secure the return of Nijel Pack, Wooga Poplar, and Norchad Omier for Larranaga—and added Matthew Cleveland from FSU. It was a dud. These things happen.

You might remember that Miami made the initial NIL splash with a big deal for Kansas State guard Nijel Pack, who got Jim Larranaga to a second Final Four.

Four-hundred thousand dollars’ worth of elite point guard with a 40-inch vertical leap went up for a dunk Saturday afternoon in Miami’s Midwest Regional off-day shootaround at the T-Mobile Center. The physical act of Nijel Pack throwing down drew more raves from sideline observers than the fact he is earning $400K per year to do it.

Increasingly — across the tournament and across the nation — that is as it should be. The ability to get such NIL benefits has ushered in an era when such six-figure deals hardly make us blink anymore.

The fifth-seeded Canes are within 40 minutes of their first Final Four Sunday against Texas. But the subtext is rooted in what – at least on the surface – is one of the best teams money can buy.

Pack signed a two-year NIL deal worth $800,000 when he transferred from Kansas State in the offseason. Teammate Isaiah Wong has a deal worth at least $100,000 per year. It is a lot, legal and public. Billionaire Miami booster John Ruiz wanted it that way.

For a short time, Miami set the market in college basketball by overpaying for players. Pack is still there. That’s either remarkable or fitting, however you want to look at it. Suddenly Jim Larranaga sounds terribly worn out by college basketball, just so exhausted by the current climate.

Here’s what he had to say during that Final Four run:

“There are a lot of schools that do the same thing we do,” Canes coach Jim Larranaga said. “We just don’t know about it because it’s not public knowledge. Why not? Why are we afraid of sharing that information?

“The second thing is … TV makes money, right? The shoe companies make money. The universities make money … And the coaches make a hell of a living. What’s wrong with that filtering down?”

Now?

“I’m exhausted,” Larrañaga said. “I’ve tried every which way to keep this going.”

Larrañaga joins a long line of prominent college basketball coaches — Virginia’s Tony Bennett and Villanova’s Jay Wright among them — who have left their jobs in recent years citing the changes in the game and the challenge of coaching in the name, image and likeness era of college sports.

For Larrañaga, those changes began presenting themselves when he had eight players — all of whom said they were happy at Miami — enter the transfer portal after the Hurricanes went to the Final Four in 2023.

“The opportunity to make money someplace else created a situation that you have to begin to ask yourself as a coach what is this all about,” Larrañaga said. “And the answer is it’s become professional.”

Huh.