WBB: Laila Phelia In the Portal
Unsure what is happening, but KBA now has like 4+ open roster spots to get busy with to fill. Devastating to lose someone this big.
That a huge loss for the team. I wonder the reason. I can surmise but I don't think it is fair to her for me to speculate about this on the board without any knowledge.
Given that unfounded speculation seems to be the lifeblood of the internet, I admire your restraint.
Given my interest in understanding why this may have happened, I also do not admire your restraint.
This one is weird. We routinely lose excellent players from our women’s hoops program, and I don’t have any idea why.
Genuinely curious who you think the other excellent players they've lost are. Maddie Nolan and Cam Williams are solid players who aren't/didn't use their fifth years here. Taylor Woodson was a tough one a week ago.. But I don't think it's exactly a routine.
Perhaps my word choice of excellent was a bit strong, but I I’m thinking of the three players you mentioned, as well as Phelia. Those are four very good players who transferred from the program with eligibility remaining in a very recent timeframe. This routine nature of losing strong players with eligibility remaining to other programs is puzzling to me.
I think our opinions of Cam Williams and Maddie Nolan differ, and I don't view them as big losses and combine that with them giving us the four years they committed to it's less concerning. It is getting a little puzzling putting it all together I admit.
I hear you - it may just be a few people looking for a new opportunity vs something systemic. Phelia, in particular, is a curious case, though.
I'm hoping it's just the fact that there's a few places in women's hoops you can make good money, and Michigan just isn't one of them. As much as that would suck for KBA to have a player of that caliber who was here for three years leave, it's better than the alternative of culture issues/not liking KBA.
Honestly in the current landscape with NIL, you’re almost doing yourself a disservice if you DON’T shop yourself around and see what someone is willing to offer.
Maddie Nolan was far more valuable than people are giving her credit for. Very good 3pt shooter. Tough defender. Smart player. Leg injury hampered her. But I would have liked to retain her. She made the tourney this year.
I might be a bit too harsh, I agree. I really liked her, my thought was Elissa Brett gave us pretty close to what Maddie was (slightly worse 3 point shooting) and quality defense. You need Maddie Nolan's on your team, but didn't feel like a tipping point of putting this team at another level.
WTF?
Dayummmmm...
WTH is going on in the ladies gym?
Warde would say transformational not transaction. I say pay the players.
Laila Phelia probably wants to play for a Final Four / National Championship caliber team for her senior season.
Your post is the equivalent of IU football fans saying "Pay AJ Barner a lot in NIL to keep him from going to Michigan" when he made clear that he wanted to go to a National Championship contender.
Def wants to play for a team with a shit.
Ring culture has hurt pro basketball, but it’s quick creep into the college game will be absolutely devastating.
Easy to say when it's not YOUR money.
Seriously--we all can gripe about how other schools pay more, but it's not the schools paying, it's the fanbase (particularly the richest fans) paying. So if you want to catch up on NIL, open your bank account and contribute. Then you can complain about the rest of us not helping out. But it's sort of meaningless to complain that others aren't paying enough NIL to keep good players.
People won’t like to hear it but NIL is never going to be a factor here for women’s basketball. It’s the same issue that boosters had with the men’s basketball program last year. What is the return on investment? Yeah, they could’ve paid Dickinson more money to stay but what does that get us? A CBI invite at most with how bad this team was.
In women’s basketball what is your ROI? Sweet 16 appearance tops? As opposed to not giving NIL where you could maybe get to the round of 32. What’s the difference?
It’s part of the reason that Women’s basketball has always had such a hard time catching on. There are a handful of schools that accumulate all the talent and with so little parity it’s harder to attract new fans.
^^^TRUTH^^^
Never popular but remains what it is.
That’s a chicken/egg statement. If you don’t invest success never comes. Never is a very strong statement in the current day as it would only take one very wealthy booster for a sport like WBB. Success begets success.
From an ROI perspective it might even be more attractive than football. The WNBA salary cap is less than $2m. For $3M/year you’d be capable of building a college level super team where your bench players are making WNBA super max money.
It's a chicken and egg thing though. I have no idea the market, but what if someone had a million dollars to give KBA for the 2025 class. Have to imagine she could at least get 3-4 top 20 girls right? Assuming SC, Stanford, LSU aren't handing ladies 250K to come to their school.. That feels like a really good base to get you to start making the elite eight/maybe a final four push.
It feels like women's basketball would be one of the best ROI in sports in terms of success. What does 250K get you in football? A four star who may or may not pan out in a sport with 22 starters, or you could get one or two top ten women's hoops recruits that will help you breeze past the other top 25 teams who are trying to make it to the next tier of teams. Now this would require someone caring about women's basketball that much, and I certainly do not have this money and never will tell/ask anyone how to spend their money.
Edit, I see I was beaten to the punch.
I’m actually amazed at how well our logic tracks down to the amount you’d have to pay per player.
Hahaha I love it, that's wild.
I say pay the players.
I say pay the players in alignment and equality to the revenue and interest they generate.
I would say first worry about making the university affordable for anyone to attend before worrying about *paying* a select few students to be there...
That is Community College. National Guard, Military Service, Trades and Unions. So many great options in the USA.
Hot take: you shouldn’t have to join the military to receive an affordable education.
☝️
And you shouldn't have to be a premiere athlete to get it for free (or heavily discounted).
I mean, you already don’t. Academic scholarships and grants are already a thing.
The people paying - rich alums - aren't getting any revenue or return on investment on their money no matter what. If anything it makes the school money, but I think they mostly do it because they have pride in the school and enjoy seeing their teams win.
To quote Slim Pickens: "What in the wide, wide world of sports is going on here?"
Laila Phelia probably wants to play for a Final Four / National Championship caliber team for her senior season.
Unfortunately, Michigan Basketball is not that. We have 2 Sweet 16 appearances (2021, 2022) and 1 Elite 8 appearance (2022) in our entire history.
Because Michigan is not a top 10 caliber *program* in women's college basketball, we're likely to lose players who aspire for more...
KBA has done a great job of making Michigan Women's Basketball respectable but we're still a long way from being elite much less dominant.
The problem as I've seen it with WBB is that there's like 4 teams that can describe themselves as "dominant," and then kind of everybody else. The landscape seems to be getting a bit more even the last few years, but it's still very unbalanced between the haves and the have-nots.
Yep. Your point is true.
Back in the early 2000s, it was UConn, Tennessee, and Stanford followed by Notre Dame plus Baylor as the dominant programs in the top 5. (I could be forgetting a program.)
In that time span, there were some new winners - like 1999 Purdue, 2006 Maryland. But the top was more or less solidified.
After Pat Summitt's retirement, Tennessee fell off. But Tennessee's spot was taken by South Carolina and Dawn Staley. And Staley is young so she can keep doing this for another 20+ years if she wants.
There is definitely a tier system. There's a top 5-6. Then a top 12-15. And then top 25 (with a lot of change near the bottom) depending on which coaches retire, which coaches are promoted/hired, and which players leave/graduate.
Michigan is currently in that fringe top 25 team zone.
KBA made us respectable. But you can see how it will be difficult for her to elevate Michigan from a fringe top 25 program to a top 12-15 program if her best player leaves after 2-3 seasons for better programs. The Transfer Portal is a good thing for a blue blood football program but a bad thing for an above average women's basketball program that is trying to improve.
The Transfer Portal has basically made the vast majority of college athletics into the minor leagues for the super established / successful programs.
exactly. guessing she ends up at one of the current final four teams - LSU, USC (ntUSC), iowa
Iowa was elevated by Clark and they had a very veteran core group. They will likely not reach these heights again for a while. Most of South Carolina’s roster is intact besides Cordosa so I don’t know if that’s the destination. LSU might be the move with Van Lith leaving. Her and Flau’jae would make a pretty formidable backcourt
Van Lith wasn't a fit as the primary ball handler, and Laila hasn't really been a primary ball handler and I don't think that's where she's best suited either. Considering they shoe horned Leigha Brown and Lauren Hansen into those roles the last two years even though they had played off ball their whole careers. So unless LSU moves Flau'jae to the point that would be another odd fit.
Clark certainly elevated Iowa, but Iowa had been a very good team before CC. Bluder has recruited well and consistently in finding quality players like Gutsafon, CC, etc. She has a good track record that we shouldn't expect Iowa to fall off the cliff, though they'll lose a lot in CC, Marshall and Martin from the starting lineup. Iowa does have a #9 class coming in. They made it to the Elite 8 before CC, so it's not unreasonable that they're an S16, E8 team in the post-CC era.
Double post.
Michigan basketball is certainly not that, but it feels weird if this is the case. She knew what it was coming in, when she committed they had never been to a Sweet 16, and her senior year of high school they made their first, then as a freshman made the first elite eight. She was a top 30 player out of high school, and could have gone any number of places to win at that high level, but she chose Michigan...
Woodson made no sense. This makes even less sense. There does seem to be a story going on that we'll probably never hear. Until the last week, I don't think KBA had lost anyone who could have been saved. Kysre Gondrezick was immensely talented, but her issues were obvious. As a #4 overall WNBA pick from 2021, she still hasn't appeared in a game.
I hope this doesn't translate into losing anyone from the incoming class. Without Phelia, it's a complete rebuild.
In Kysre’s defense… she did have her dad die and she did get beaten by Kevin Porter Jr so you could say she is going through it. Not to mention her sister’s husband, Dwayne Haskins, is dead now too. I also believe her grandfather passed during that time frame (I may be wrong on that)
Sure. And she is giving it a third try in WNBA training camp, just a few months after the Porter incident. Her father died just before she graduated from West Virginia. She could still turn it around. But the way she left Michigan right before the WNIT (which Michigan ended up winning) indicated significant maturity issues.
Unless the Caitlin Clark factor and most recent ratings have factored into NIL and the $ available. Clark and the "Hoosiers" effect cant be discounted after the villain at LSU was perceived as disrespectful and many wanted to see payback.
It would not surprise me to see television ratings return to former levels or even dip less Caitlin Clark as the top tier programs remain top tier.
Women's hoops has plenty of ugly step sisters but no Cinderellas.
The Final Four ratings are mind-boggling. I think less the LSU "incident" - which seemed more a media creation than reality, at least to the players and coaches. Clearly, in the rematch last week, the players were focused, played well (Angel Reese tweaked her ankle, and that might have turned the game) and there didn't seem to be any bad blood. I think more the Harlem Globetrotters half-court shots and scoring records, plus Iowa being one place where women's basketball has been important for a long time.
I would expect a regression to the mean, but I think there has been a fundamental change. Maybe the NIL and the fact that any men's player with serious NBA potential is gone in one or two years has people giving the women's game a longer look.
It's a real shame about Phelia leaving. I hope it isn't NIL. But I hope it's not any number of things related to the program itself. She's from Cincinnati, so it's unlikely to be a homesickness issue like you'd expect with SEC or former PAC-12 country. And the Big Ten is a competitive, top conference - not that distant from SEC level.
Our basketball programs both have semblances. Some of them are on display. Some lesve, some are shown the door. One thing remains constant, Crisler will remain open.
Unless you are the coach at one of the “fortunate” programs in your specific sport, I’m not sure why anyone would want to coach college athletics in this current environment.
I’m happy college athletes can now earn money and have more freedom to transfer. However, the constant possibility of a complete team walk out at the end of every season, even at good programs, has to suck for the coaches and the players who are committed to the program.
I expect the number of players hitting the portal to continue to increase. Not all of them will leave, but in the present environment if you're good enough that your program will take you back if you decide to stay you're almost cheating yourself if you don't put your name in the portal and find out what's out there in terms of NIL and/or opportunities to play for one of the truly elite programs.
It's a sad reality that Michigan isn't one of those truly elite programs, at least not yet, but I still very much believe that KBA has the program on the right track.
How big a part does NIL play in WBB? Is anyone in WBB doing NIL the Texas A&M way?
It's the highest revenue generating women's sport. NIL is pretty new, but my guess it is going to be significant for the best players. Players like Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese, Paige Bueckers, Juju Watkins, Cameron Brink, Flau'jae Johnson, and Hailey Van Lith have received significant endorsement deals off the top of my head, and that is outside of whatever NIL they get from school collectives.