Where Did Jeremy Roach Go?

I was wondering this while watching some early season Duke basketball games, but naturally I assumed he simply graduated and left for the pros. I couldn’t remember him getting drafted, but he was always a fringe NBA prospect, so maybe he went to Europe or something.

But no! A few days later, there he was, hitting a game-winning three for Baylor:

It turns out he transferred back in April, but the circumstances are a little murky. In an interview with Jeff Goodman, Roach said that he “wanted to stay… but it was just time to go.” He highlighted the opportunity to play in a more pure point guard role, a position he was kind of squeezed out of in his last years at Duke. 

The real reason, though, likely has to do with NIL money. For years now, people in college sports have referred to the new system of transfers and NIL packages as the college sports version of free agency. But I hadn’t quite internalized that until hearing a player say, “I wanted to stay but we couldn’t make it work.” That’s how free agents talk.

The Blue Devils brought in a huge recruiting class this year, led by Cooper Flagg, the presumptive #1 pick in next year’s NBA Draft. And while the NIL money those players are going to make often comes in the form of personalized deals, the schools also devote resources to procuring and managing those deals, either by acting as a kind of agent, or through the various collectives that schools organize to pool money for their players. For someone like Jeremy Roach, who is a very good player but not a superstar, his compensation likely depends a lot on how much the school is able to prioritize him. And since he was overshadowed at Duke by these big new names, Baylor was probably able to commit more to him financially.

I say “probably” because all this is very opaque and mysterious. The rules around NIL are still not well understood, and none of these deals are public. Reports about how much players are getting paid in various sponsorship agreements usually rely on press releases put out by the companies themselves, and so we should treat them with extreme skepticism. And how individual players are compensated by school collectives seem to vary from school to school and year to year, with no rules or oversight.

In this way, the new system in college sports is very UNLIKE free agency, which is actually a pretty transparent process in professional sports. Everyone knows who the free agents are; they know when they sign, and for how much. League salaries and pay structures have to be reported to the leagues and are tightly regulated by the collective-bargaining agreements in those leagues. By contrast, the NIL system is the wild west.

It’s annoying to admit this, because most of the people complaining about NIL and the transfer portal are people who want to limit the autonomy of players, and go back to the old, exploitative system that existed in college sports for decades. I certainly don’t want that, but the new system seems to be opening up a new kind of exploitation. The lack of transparency about what players are getting paid, and by whom, is certainly a recipe for abuse by schools and employers. 

The fact that a few star players have been able to sign huge NIL deals that make them millions of dollars is not especially comforting to me. The old system of “amateur” athletics wasn’t bad because we have too few rich 18-year-olds in this country — it was that college athletes were being treated like employees without having the protections and compensation of employees. That hasn’t really changed, and until it does, the problem isn’t solved.