[TheFarm07]

Not a lot to add to what has been said.  I've been through worse losses at Maples.  Nice that North Carolina State is not a bunch of transfers, but just a really good team the old-fashioned way.  I do wonder how the season would be going had we matched USC's $800,000 to keep Kiki. 

A comparable would be the 2012-13 team after Nneka graduated and Chiney became the obvious focal point of the team, head and shoulders above the rest of the squad.

If we say Chiney that year is about equivalent to Kiki this year, then we would move onto the supporting cast. I think right now, I would pick Orrange, Tinkle, Bonnie and Ruef over Agara, Demetre, Clardy and Heal.

---

All of us are disappointed.  But let's be sure we direct our concern in the right direction.  This has almost nothing to do with the motivation of our players or the quality of our coaching.  We have 4 WNBA players on our coaching staff.  They know a thing or two about basketball and player development.  No, it has everything to do with the corruption of college athletics by money and the destruction of ethical standards that have come with the gross weakening of the NCAA. 

Kiki Iriafen would still be leading our team were it not for USC's ability to buy her out with $800,000--something unimaginable when we still attempted to say that college sports was an amateur activity.  (And let's not forget that WE developed her.  She was a somewhat mediocre forward for her first year or two.  And now a different team can cash in on her.)  Lauren Betts would still be a Stanford player in another era too.  And many of the teams we play against (though not North Carolina State) would be much weaker were it not for their ability to hire players away from the minor leagues of mid majors, with all the player development being contracted out to others.  We would be in a very different place if intercollegiate athletics understood that transferring is disruptive to academic success and that the primary purpose of an academy is academics.  But we seem to have lost the ethical battle for college athletics, and are attempting to compete against those who embrace the new slime. 

Stanford always had higher academic and ethical standards than much of its competition (yes there was an OLD slime too), and that is the primary reason I love Stanford athletics.  But the new rules are making it much, much harder to be competitive while upholding elite academic values.  And no coach--none--would have an easy time with that at Stanford.

Sadly, we may need to measure our success in other ways than we are used to, given that the most fundamental rules of the game have changed.

Weren't transfers forced to sit out a year before they could play? Was the rule changed because of NIL or was it COVID? I always thought if the rule was still in place, it would somewhat soften the impact of NIL and players would think twice before changing teams if they had to wait an entire season before they could play.

[TheFarm07]

Not a lot to add to what has been said.  I've been through worse losses at Maples.  Nice that North Carolina State is not a bunch of transfers, but just a really good team the old-fashioned way.  I do wonder how the season would be going had we matched USC's $800,000 to keep Kiki. 

A comparable would be the 2012-13 team after Nneka graduated and Chiney became the obvious focal point of the team, head and shoulders above the rest of the squad.

If we say Chiney that year is about equivalent to Kiki this year, then we would move onto the supporting cast. I think right now, I would pick Orrange, Tinkle, Bonnie and Ruef over Agara, Demetre, Clardy and Heal.

---

All of us are disappointed.  But let's be sure we direct our concern in the right direction.  This has almost nothing to do with the motivation of our players or the quality of our coaching.  We have 4 WNBA players on our coaching staff.  They know a thing or two about basketball and player development.  No, it has everything to do with the corruption of college athletics by money and the destruction of ethical standards that have come with the gross weakening of the NCAA. 

Kiki Iriafen would still be leading our team were it not for USC's ability to buy her out with $800,000--something unimaginable when we still attempted to say that college sports was an amateur activity.  (And let's not forget that WE developed her.  She was a somewhat mediocre forward for her first year or two.  And now a different team can cash in on her.)  Lauren Betts would still be a Stanford player in another era too.  And many of the teams we play against (though not North Carolina State) would be much weaker were it not for their ability to hire players away from the minor leagues of mid majors, with all the player development being contracted out to others.  We would be in a very different place if intercollegiate athletics understood that transferring is disruptive to academic success and that the primary purpose of an academy is academics.  But we seem to have lost the ethical battle for college athletics, and are attempting to compete against those who embrace the new slime. 

Stanford always had higher academic and ethical standards than much of its competition (yes there was an OLD slime too), and that is the primary reason I love Stanford athletics.  But the new rules are making it much, much harder to be competitive while upholding elite academic values.  And no coach--none--would have an easy time with that at Stanford.

Sadly, we may need to measure our success in other ways than we are used to, given that the most fundamental rules of the game have changed.

Weren't transfers forced to sit out a year before they could play? Was the rule changed because of NIL or was it COVID? I always thought if the rule was still in place, it would somewhat soften the impact of NIL and players would think twice before changing teams if they had to wait an entire season before they could play.