New Wings coach Jose Fernandez gets brutally honest about state of college sports

The Dallas Wings decided to go the college route and hire Jose Fernandez to be the next head coach of the franchise. He had been at the University of South Florida for 25 years, leading that program to more success than they could expect, but he felt now was the right time to get out.

It helps that an opportunity came up to coach a talent like Paige Bueckers, but the state of college athletics is not a pleasant one right now. We’ve seen legendary coaches across multiple sports step down, such as Nick Saban with Alabama football, and a lot of it is because of how ungoverned college sports are. The transfer portal and NIL, while extremely beneficial for the athletes, make it extremely difficult to be a coach.

Now that Fernandez is in the WNBA, he has the opportunity to speak out about what’s wrong with college sports these days. And he did so on the “No Offseason” Podcast with The Athletic.

” I think the biggest thing… what was the appropriate time to open up the transfer portal, and how long was the transfer portal [to] be open?… The biggest thing that everybody was in agreement on within our conference captains, our stewardship group, and our board of directors calls, which we make recommendations from the women’s basketball coaches association to the oversight committee, and then the oversight committee makes those decisions. We felt that 15 days was the right number. Our initial position was right after the first weekend [of the NCAA Tournament].

“We were all in total agreement [with] the 15 days. I know it’s really difficult to wait after the Final Four because… some teams, their season could be over the last week of February [or] early March. So now student athletes have to wait for a whole month to get into the portal. But again, then you talk about what is the most important thing for student athletes and 68 teams in the tournament and the coaches and the student athletes in preserving the integrity of the tournament and putting the main focus on the NCAA Tournament and its success and how much the NCAA Tournament has grown, increasing the the the TV coverage, the amount of teams playing in it, also the shared revenue in the units that now it’s a second year that is happening with women’s basketball.”

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However, the transfer portal wasn’t the only thing Fernandez thinks needs fixing. He also took aim at the somewhat newly minted NET system.

“Next thing we really need to look at is the NET and the quadrant system. There are major, major flaws in this system. You know, I started when it was home away, neutral, RPI, right? As you can see, Ben, if you play a tournament, you play a team, the NET can be manipulated by what? Margin of victory, right? Right. And a lot of the offensive and defensive components that are put in the NET formula. So, that needs to be really looked at.

“…That’s why at South Florida, I always had to play the schedule we’re playing in November and December to try and do our manipulating of the NET as well in regards to strength schedule margins and everything like that.”

He went into deeper detail about it, but the NET system is highly flawed. Teams can boost their analytics by beating up on some of the worst teams in college basketball, and that can lead to some serious debate once the selection committee gets together.

Their heart was at least in the right place with this, because there’s a little more transparency in the selection process, but it’s still a long way away from where it needs to be. And that doesn’t even touch the College Football Playoff and their selection process, which has been a mess basically since the beginning.

Fernandez still sits as the President of the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association, so he’ll still be involved with some of the decision-making on things. And having a leader like that is what makes his jump to the WNBA so fascinating.

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