La Salle, Woj, and UNLV: One day illustrated the mess of college sports and the challenge of surviving it

Three news events Wednesday of varying national and local interest, three points on the messy map of major college athletics:

In Las Vegas, Matthew Sluka, who had been the starting quarterback of UNLV’s football team, announced that he was leaving immediately — with the Rebels off to a 3-0 start this season — because the school did not follow through on a verbal offer of $100,000 that an assistant coach had made to him.

More than 2,300 miles to the east, in Olean, N.Y., St. Bonaventure held a press conference to introduce the new general manager of its men’s basketball program: Adrian Wojnarowski, Bona Class of ‘91 and former NBA newsbreaker extraordinaire for ESPN.

And close to 350 miles south of western New York, on West Olney Avenue, La Salle officials unveiled Tom Gola Plaza, the refurbished area outside the university’s athletic headquarters, then allowed the ceremony’s attendees to tour the not-quite-finished John E. Glaser Arena, set to open in less than two months.

Each event was indicative of a different reality within the full picture of college sports, of name, image, and likeness and collectives and unrestricted movement by players. Line them up side by side, and they seem to be a color spectrum, a progression from the purely transactional nature of UNLV vs. Sluka … to Woj’s willingness to leverage his global web of relationships to help his beloved alma mater … to what Explorers coach Fran Dunphy called “as old-school an appreciation and experience” as possible.

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In fact, for schools such as La Salle, St. Joseph’s, and others that are a long way from the Power 5 or the Big East, that old-school approach — one that might seem idealistic or hokey or downright naïve in this era — might be the best and only chance they have to compete. The college or university tries to build a unique and attractive community among its students, its alumni, its administrators and faculty and employees — and that ecosystem draws in athletes and keeps them there.

If you watched the Woj presser or attended the La Salle dedication Wednesday, you could see how these smaller institutions will have to rely on a particular kind of messaging and strategy, one that plays to their inherent strengths: Come here. Yes, we can give you money to play basketball. But there’s something here more than money. You will grow as a person. You will get an education. You’ll form relationships that will last for the rest of your life. (Disclosure time: Woj is a friend, and I’m a La Salle grad.)

Of course, the contact list on Woj’s phone will give Bonnies coach Mark Schmidt access to players he once never would have considered recruiting because he once never would have believed he could coax them to Cattaraugus County. Of course, Woj will call in favors and make sales pitches to the people with the deepest pockets in the sport in the hope of turning them into Bona boosters. Of course the money and current condition of the Bonaventure program — it’s one of the best in the Atlantic 10 — matter.

But it’s also the rare athletic administrator who, in running down the list of recruiting tools, mentions recent upsets of UCLA and Oklahoma State, then touts the university’s student-run soup kitchen. Woj did Wednesday.

“Our players’ families loved the idea that their sons were going to be part of volunteering,” he said. “They were eager for it. It helped attract them to Bonaventure. … We want young men to know, young players to know, that when you come to St. Bonaventure, you are a giant killer, and you do that with the benefit of a small, intimate, caring campus. There’s nobody quite like us in a major conference, and that’s an advantage for us.”

La Salle has little choice but to sing from the same hymnal. “We want to win,” Daniel Allen, the university’s president, said Wednesday. “It’s not as if we say, ‘Come here. If we don’t win a basketball game, it’s OK.’ No, that would not be OK. But community comes first. Wins without a sense of why this place is special wouldn’t work.”

Allen’s understanding of athletics as “the front porch” to a place like La Salle is a welcome change. It took too many years for the university’s leaders to acknowledge that basketball was intrinsic and essential to its identity, that improving the program would encourage alumni and donors to reestablish connections to the school, and that they needed to increase and allocate their resources accordingly.

The arena’s expansion, to a facility with updated amenities and a capacity of more than 3,000 spectators, is a first step that was a long time coming, but it’s still just a first step.

“We’re going to have to make asks after this,” La Salle athletic director Ash Puri said. “Now, we don’t ever want to be in the UNLV situation. That’s just bad business, right? Because now they’re going to be branded as people who can’t keep their promises. But that’s our reality. This is just the start, and we can’t shy away from it.”

No, they can’t. There’s no way around it. Every program’s situation is unique. Every school is calibrating the balance between building a strong social and academic culture and raising enough money to attract elite athletic talent, and some can play this new game at a higher level.

After four years at La Salle, for instance, guard Jhamir Brickus committed to Villanova in April as a graduate transfer. It’s easy to chalk up such a move to the world of NIL, and no one can or should blame Brickus for doing what he believes is best for him, his family, and his future. But let’s be real: So far, he hasn’t been starring in any TV ads for Campus Corner Pizza or BMW of Devon.

“That’s a good point to make in all this,” Dunphy said. “Is it NIL, or is it strictly pay-for-play at this point? The perfect blend is adding two freshmen and two transfers to your team. The concern you might have at a level like ours is that, if those two freshmen do really well, the chances you’re going to retain them is maybe not so great. That’s where we have to do some centering, and the NCAA will hopefully do a good job of letting us all know. We need governance in all of this stuff, because it looks like free agency, no salary cap, and where are we going to end up?”

Nobody knows yet. It’s all too messy now, too chaotic. The only certainty is this: The challenge for La Salle and programs like it will be simple. The challenge will be to survive.

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