Per 247. Not awesome.
NEWS: Virginia Tech point guard Brandon Rechsteiner will enter the transfer portal, he tells @247Sports.Led the team in assists this season & is a former four-star recruit. Picked the Hokies over Xavier, LSU, Tennessee & others. || Story: https://t.co/AYho0i9ZoP pic.twitter.com/bJ9r5zDuAp— Travis Branham (@TravisBranham_) March 19, 2025
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Not surprised.
Don't think he was in the long-term plans here. Not enough offensive impact to make up for his high turnover rate.
Wessler, Brown, and Rech are all guys I expected to Portal. Young I thought had enough promise to try and keep around.
Goodbye, Big Papa Pump Jr. We hardly knew ye.
Assume the whole fucking roster turns over every year
Pitino was on Pardon My Take earlier this week and said college basketball is a carbon copy of Euroleague. He's right. It's going to be rare if a player stays with a team for more than two years. If he sucks, he's going to get dog-walked. If he's too good, he's leaving for the NBA or a better NIL offer. The only way guys will stay for 3 or more years is if he's slighly beating expectations and no one outside of Blacksburg notices.
Unless there are 1. Limits on salaries for players and 2. Limits on the amount of times and when a player can transfer - Virginia Tech is done as a major competitor in the P4. Not negativity, not hyperbole. Our opportunity to be a top 6 ish ACC hoops team was to get old and have Mike Young out coach folks- especially with HOF coaches leaving. That is gone now- you can't get old and win a couple games in the NCAAs every 2-3 years. St. Marys, Dayton, VCU, perhaps Creighton will start to feel this too. We can't do that anymore. Our team leaves every year. In football- much of the same- Find 3 stars you can redshirt, develop and nab a 4 star QB, DE to compliment and use the brand and enter sandman, etc to recruit top 25 HS classes. All of those things are essentially out the window now. So for us to be competitive we need the money to hire Pat Kelsey or Bruce Pearl or Chris Beard and we need the money to buy them a roster. We have never done either. We need to win on the football field to raise or recruiting profile- so we need to buy a Jackson Dart, A legit DE, a pro level corner, etc to win first. IMO, we are done unless major changes are made.
My heart wants you to be wrong, my head says you are right.
At least in basketball, I think the expectations are somewhat reasonable. We all understand if we make the tournament, that's cause for celebration in Blacksburg.
We're never going to be the one-and-done factory like Duke. The best case scenario was Buzz's last year - recruiting very good but not elite guys, keep them in the program for 4-5 years and throw in a top end talent like NAW. The dream situation is peak Bennett at UVa.
The only way we can do that today is targeting the low to mid 4*s and putting together competitive NIL deals with retention bonuses and buyout clauses. Idk if that's even possible.
And these aren't happening until there is some sort of collective bargaining between the schools and the players. That's the only way the professional leagues have been able to get away with these practices, as they generally violate US labor laws. That's why lawyers have been transforming the sport left and right. There's no way that Congress is going to pass a law mandating these things, because they can't get their own heads out of their own asses most of the time, and do you really want Congress to try to design a fair system? Ha!
And I don't see a collective bargaining happening any time soon. Why would the players want to do that, when they can get their bag right now? There's no organization that would represent ALL the players from top to bottom of the roster, and there's no incentive for the top level of players to play along for the rest.
Unfortunately, bud, I fear you are correct in Virginia Tech's future competitive state, absent a breakaway league that we happen to luck into. Maybe that scenario would be lucrative enough, and have a built-in level playing field, that we might be able to compete. But I'm not holding out for that possibility.
This just makes me sad. And care a bit less, TBH. =^/
All congress has to do is provide the NCAA with an anti trust exemption. That's what the pro leagues have.
The only people that can fix this shitshow is university presidents. They still have the power. They can refuse to participate in inequitable situations. They can refuse to allocate millions to player salaries. They can meet and agree to limits on student transfers, etc. You can sue your company if you get fired, but you still don't own the company. The owner does, and he can hire lawyers too and he can find someone to replace you. University presidents are much more powerful than players, coaches, the NCAA, ESPN. They could end all of this- rather easily.
And that would get them sued so fast, their collective heads would spin. That's what the antitrust exemption is for, to allow for that collusive behavior which, absent that exemption, would be against several labor laws. The ones that lawyers have been using successfully over the past two decades to unravel the rules behind college athletics.
This should probably be a separate thread, though.
cool- then play offense. Go after under the table payments that are still happening. Go after Nike that pays AAU kids to go to duke- which is still not legal. If players sue Virginia Tech, fix the shit show the other way by playing offense. Go after all of the illegal shit, require players to read on grade level to get into your school. They have the power. VT can admit whomever they fucking like. It's been that way since the dawn of time.
At some point some one is going screw up and prove that most players don't have NIL value, the jersey holds the value. Women college basketball is way more popular than the pros, those same players don't get the same NIL they got in college. So it's not the players it's the jersey.
different markets
But they're not going to do that without some form of collective bargaining. That's the balance to the antitrust exemption to prevent exploitation.
Didn't he also lead the team in turnovers?
Technically he was tied with Lawal lol