With the news that Alexander Lesburt Jr. is pulling a Caden Pierce at Brown men’s basketball, sitting out his senior season and entering the portal, the alarm bells are getting louder and louder.
First, as to Lesburt. He was expected to be a key player for Mike Martin after averaging 10.3 points and 3.6 rebounds per game last season and is a skilled three-point shooter. But he is no longer on the team, Brown announced Tuesday, noting he left the program to preserve his final year of eligibility.
Numerous Ivy players in basketball and other sports are exploring this three-year graduation route to obtain a coveted Ivy League degree and get another payday year elsewhere.
There were top Ivy players last year who thought long about sitting out but didn’t choose to do so.
Pierce, the 2023-24 Ivy Player of the Year for Princeton, is a highly coveted portal player, with suitors like UConn, Duke and Purdue, among others, as he pursues his Economics degree and preserve his final season of eligibility.
There is little argument that the quality of Ivy basketball on the men’s and women’s side is down this year. The men are 18-18 out of conference and the women, with three stellar teams in Princeton, Columbia and Harvard, are 19-16. The fact that players like Xaivian Lee (who left Princeton for Florida) and Tabitha Amanze (who left Princeton for Virginia) among others, have defected is no small coincidence.
Penn now has an active NIL collective. It has a six-figure fund which is growing and keep doing so substantially if Penn has a good year.
The Ivy League announced in January it would opt out of the revenue-sharing element of a $2.8 billion NCAA settlement forged last year aimed at paying athletes a share of the revenue colleges made from their performances. Only the Patriot League has made the same decision. Look for the Patriot opt-out to be reviewed closely after this season.
It is not unreasonable to believe that some top men’s and women’s Ivy players will either sit out or simply leave after this season.
Many Ivy athletes feel that they deserve to be treated the same as their brethren at the likes of Rice, Northwestern, Duke, etc. They are speaking openly about this with their feet.
Is anyone listening?
Richard Kent is a longtime Ivy Hoops Online contributor who has developed NIL programs for schools as an attorney.
You do a great job defining and describing the issue. I wish you could do the same thing with proposed solutions. The people who run the league are not likely to recognize the reality of the world in 2025. Or they do not see your issue as a problem for “us.”
you forgot to mention that Lesburt broke his foot in pre season and still has rehabing to do.
The only way the league changes is if we become embarrassingly bad. Like bottom 3 conference in Division I bad. All eight teams below 250 NET/KP ratings bad.
Till then, teams of 19 year-old future doctors will have to battle 24 year-old full-time athletes from mid and high major conferences.