Transfer portal blues

Lousy. Poaching. Bastards.

There. I feel better now.

OK, so not really.

Lousy ... poaching ... candy-stripe bastards.

Ah. NOW I feel better.

That more suits the mood of this Ball State alum upon the news the best player on the Cardinals 20-win basketball team, 6-9 forward Payton Sparks, has decided to bolt to Indiana via the transfer portal. Thaaaat's super. Thaaaat's outstanding. Ball State gets him for two years, and then he's off to Bloomington.

As if, I don't know, BSU is just a farm team for Indiana now. 

The plain unvarnished truth is, however, just about every school on Ball State's level of D-I buckets is a farm team now, or at least a potential farm team. This is what the   transfer portal and NIL has wrought, and the Blob can't say it's opposed. It's just that the scales that were so unfairly weighted against college athletes before have become weighted just as heavily in the other direction, because the NCAA had no plan for this and now it's the Wild West out there.

Which is makes mid-majors such as Ball State particularly vulnerable. And which is also why a friend of mine and I sort of half-predicted today's news a few weeks ago.

We were two Ball State grads in Muncie for the Cardinals' last home game of the  season, on a foul Friday night with the students scattering for spring break. The Cards lost to MAC regular-season champ Toledo that night, but Sparks went for 24 points and 11 boards. He scored 17 of Ball State's 24 first-half points, and looked like nothing so much as a mid-major version of Zion Williamson.

At some point that night, my friend and I acknowledged the success of Ball State's first-year head coach Michael Lewis, who played for Bob Knight at IU. Then I nodded toward Sparks and said, "Now watch IU swoop in and steal him. Be just like 'em."

I was kidding, sort of. And then it happened.

And, listen, I don't blame the kid. He's damn good. He's Big Ten good. And he almost hopped the portal for Bloomington after last season. 

But he stuck around Muncie for one more season. So good on him.

Still doesn't keep me from hoping those five ancient  banners at one end of Assembly Hall fall victim to a plague of moths. 

Or that a giant sinkhole opens up beneath the Sample Gates.

Or that Nick's English Hut runs out of beer some Saturday night.

"Wow," you're saying now. "You really ARE bitter."

Ah, not really. I know it's a brave new world, and I'm realistic enough to acknowledge Ball State's place in it. Besides, at least our media and communications school is still better.

So there.