I just watched Xaivian make a beautiful backdoor layup against Kentucky. Dick Vitale is singing his praises. It’s frustrating that Princeton doesn’t recruit older transfers even after their senior stars leave the program. Do any teams in the Ivy League other than Penn do this?
Cornell, Columbia and Yale have transfers this year. Yale’s Simmons is the most notable.
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Casey Simmons was a transfer from Northwestern.
Paxson Wojcik (Brown '21-'23) was a transfer.
Totally agree. Princeton, in some way, must adapt to the new landscape. Rethinking the transfer policy is essential imo.
I also heard Penn Alumni tried to help players get paid internships but the school shut this down. This is the type of NIL the Ivy League should embrace but inexplicably won’t.
Alumni helping kids get internships has been happening forever.
The last Princeton transfer I remember was Sean Jackson, a terrific guard who played a key role with the great teams of the late 80s/early 90s after playing a year for Ohio University. Princeton stopped admitting transfers around the time that he graduated then started allowing transfers again in 2016. Is the prohibition on athletic transfers written university policy or just practice?
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Sean Jackson has been the only transfer to play basketball at princeton. 35 years.
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Alumni help players get internships now but what the Penn alumni were attempting to do was to create a collective that would fund the internships. For example, if a player wanted to work for a hedge fund over the summer, the alumni collective not the company employing the player would pay his salary. This would make it a lot easier for the players. The problem is the potential for abuse. How would salaries be set? How would you prevent “no-show” jobs? I think there could be an established salary range for the entire league that would be commensurate with the work performed and that the players and employers would have to certify that real work was being done. As long as it was “pay to work” and not “pay to play” the Ivy League should have no problem with such an arrangement.
Sean Jackson played in the early ‘90s.
Class of ‘92
Brain fart on the dates there. I saw Jackson play all 40 minutes in the brutal NCAA loss to Nova in the Carrier Dome in ‘91. Tigers were an 8 seed and lost by two on a last second shot. Still hurts.
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They missed a ton of open shots they made all year in that game
Funny how some of you folks weren’t calling for uniform policies on financial aid when it helped some teams more than others.
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I hope we call all agree that there must be uniform rules in all Ivy League sports. I was just pointing out that the League should adopt the Penn alumni’s attempt to expand NIL opportunities for its basketball players. If Princeton continues to not recruit transfers while other programs do, they will be at a competitive disadvantage. That would be an inexplicable self-inflicted wound. The only parallel I can think of Clemson football not seeking players from the transfer portal because they preferred to develop their own players. That hasn’t worked out well for Clemson and will not work for Princeton, especially now where the top players get poached.
Again, this has not been the case in Ivy basketball for quite some time; H-Y-Pr have all had financial advantages regarding attracting athletes.
What are those advantages as they apply to athletes( A real question)?
I don’t know the intricacies of the financial aid policies of the Ivy League schools for their athletes. Why do Princeton, Harvard and Yale have an advantage? Does this advantage apply to all sports?
Princeton’s financial aid is phenomenal. It applies equally to all students, whether they are athletes or not. Families with household income up to $150,000 pay nothing to attend Princeton. Household income up to $200,000 pay no tuition. Aid is entirely in the form of grants, not loans. I believe some form of aid is granted up to household income of $350,000.
Correct–the 3 schools with the largest endowments (and considerably smaller student bodies than Cornell and Penn) have the richest student aid, which is a substantial advantage in recruiting athletes. This is not a uniform policy throughout the league. And it is completely inconsistent with not treating all students uniformly in admission decisions–athletes, musicians, and sons and daughters of big donors are not treated uniformly. So the idea of uniform policies on financial aid (the courts have pretty much ended the notion of the League agreeing to such policies) is outdated.