Wisconsin guard Chucky Hepburn has entered the transfer portal. Will Fred Hoiberg try to recruit the former Bellevue West star?
My knee-jerk reaction is @#$% no. I really hate it when local players thumb their nose at the local school and sign with a rival school, especially one in the same conference.
However, look at Scott Frost, he said no to Tom Osborn but came back after, IIRC, two years and lead the Huskers to the National Championship. Hepburn has only one year of eligibility remaining so he is a short term solution.
Heck, if he helped the Huskers to a Big Ten title and a couple of wins in the NCAA Tournament I suppose I could get over my butt-hurt which goes way back to the 80’s when the Huskers lost Ronn Kellogg (KU), Kerry Trotter (Marquette), Vic Lazeretti (Marquette), and Bill Jackman (Duke). Jackman did return to NU.
Greg Zimmerman, UNL '75
Overland Park, Kansas
Nebraska was 19-17 in 2018-19, 13th place in the conference. Tim Miles was fired and Fred Hoiberg hired. Hoiberg’s first team finished 7-25 and dead last in the conference.
I can’t really blame Hepburn for looking at a school that was playing better basketball at the time.
Well, we’ll have to agree to disagree.
If he comes back and helps lead NU to a great season I’ll moderate my position. 
Greg Zimmerman, UNL '75
Overland Park, Kansas
I think we all better get used to the idea that players will move around a lot, for many different reasons. Nebraska will have another major roster turnover in basketball, something that Hoiberg seems comfortable with, but Rhule seems to think there won’t be a lot of his players entering the transfer portal during the current window. (Colorado has had around 20 of them enter the portal–again.)
These days it’s rare to find a major league baseball player who spends his entire career with one team. It may be that way in college sports now, too.
I think we are just seeing the tip of the iceberg. It would seem to be the life will be in college athletics where fans and coaches alike won’t know who is going to be on their team from year to year.
I also feel it will be worse in college sports than pro sports. If I understand correctly in college sports any number of players can enter the portal in any given year. Pro athletes at least have to be eligible for free agency so pro teams will only miss two or three players at the most.
John Papenhagen
Looking at how many people left (or were asked to leave) at Colorado last year, and how many are in the portal there again this year, it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to think that some day a college team might have its entire roster file for the transfer portal, especially in the smaller roster size sports That’d be kind of the ultimate rebellion against a school’s policies. Northwestern’s football team had an ‘us against the world, including the athletic department’ attitude last year, and it got them a bowl game.
it seems counter-intuitive, but the NCAA’s piece-meal approach to dealing with the manifest legal issues is making it worse. The only way to bring some kind of stability will be to:
- Make players employees. This will afford them protections from serious injury but would also likely cut down on the black-box influence of boosters as they would be subject to ethics laws…and jail time for serious violaitons.
- Pay them (obviously) and sign them to contracts ala the pro leagues. This is probably the ONLY way to stabilize rosters. If a player want to leave after 1 year it should be allowed, but there should be a hefty buyout for players who want to play the next year, or a non-compete clause for year (sit out a year)
- Let the NCAA become the college equivalent of the League Office. Sets rules, pays refs, etc but eligibility questions are left up to the schools and conferences.
College athletics as we know it is changed forever…and to continue to deny that instead of embracing the new reality and figuring out ways to make it work is the only way to proceed.
You make some good points but there are some sticking points in there. The concept is fine but I think making players employees in my opinion opens its own can of worms. One is where is all the money going to come from to pay all these players. And, athletes would have to be paid in all sports.
I hope I am wrong but it seems college athletics has chosen to go down a path of no return and it will change the entire face of college sports. With the portal and NIL things have already changed a ton and we have just scratched the surface. It will be interesting the next four or five years to see what direction things take. I think it is pretty obvious what direction football is going, especially the power five schools.
John Papenhagen