St. John's Rick Pitino suggests a salary cap and contracts for college basketball players
St. John’s coach Rick Pitino didn’t just spend the hours before Tuesday night’s tip-off game-planning for how to beat DePaul. He also shared some suggestions for reforming college basketball on social media.
Pitino floated two ideas – which he referred to as “food for thought’ and “possible solutions” – which were a $1.5 million to $2 million salary cap for basketball programs from the so-called "Power Six" conference and replacing the National Letter of Intent with two-year binding contracts.
These ideas come three days after Pitino, following a loss to UConn at the Garden, posited disbanding the NCAA’s enforcement staff because, as he said, “They’re of no value at all.”
On Tuesday morning, he took to X , formerly known as Twitter.
“Ok - we all want solutions to preserve our great game," he posted. "Today I'm going to suggest solution one: For basketball - have the Power 5 & Big East conference commissioners get together and create a salary cap between 1.5 [and] 2.0 million [dollars]. All contracts delivered to the league and school offices. All other conferences establish their own salary cap. I would never exclude anyone from the NCAA tournament. Obviously football is a different sport entirely and some of their talent makes more than NFL players. More solutions to follow in the coming days.”
Pitino didn't wait that long. His next idea came in a subsequent X post less than three hours later.
“Remember this is only food for thought. All possible solutions,” the post began.
“Solution 2: Do away with letters of intent, make athletes sign a two year binding contract, no different than professional athletes - which they are. With that, the collective puts together their NIL contract based on the cap. Obviously a lot has to go into this. I believe the NCAA should be taken out of the equation and the commissioners put into it as the NCAA loses more cases than the defense lawyers on Law & Order.”
Pitino has remarked, in his news conferences and on social media, about developments on the college athletics landscape.
Since the rise of the Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) rules that allow players to be compensated and the NCAA permitting transfers to become eligible immediately, instead of sitting out a season as they used to, he has said that college basketball now has “free agency” and referred to players as “professionals.”
Often his commentary has been tongue-in-cheek, as it was on Monday after the National Labor Relations Board issued a ruling allowing Dartmouth basketball players to unionize as “employees.”
“Four of my players came to me and asked to work on some shooting but I told them we couldn't because they had reached their 20 hours for the week,” his X post began.
“I begged them not to do it but my four employees said this is unconstitutional and they are taking this to court.”
In his news conference after the UConn loss, Pitino seemed to lament the state of college athletics when he said, “It's a very difficult time in college basketball — because it's free agency — and now I think what's going to happen is they're going to say everybody can transfer. . . . [One] can't really build programs in a culture because everybody leaves.”
The NCAA enforcement staff has ongoing investigations into schools that may have violated its rules regarding NIL money; it is a violation of NCAA rules for a school to use the promise of NIL money in recruiting. Last week the NCAA was taken to court by the attorneys generals of Tennessee and Virginia, who question whether the regulations are constitutional.
“The enforcement staff needs to go away,” Pitino said Saturday at the Garden. “We need to stop all the hypocrisy of NIL. Need to stop it because they can’t stop it. Whether I’m for or against it, it doesn’t matter.”
Roger Rubin returned to Newsday in 2018 to write about high schools, colleges and baseball following 20 years at the Daily News. A Baseball Hall of Fame voter since 2011, he has covered 13 MLB postseasons and 14 NCAA Final Fours.