NIL questions emerge after Jim Boeheim's comments, but Pitt's Jeff Capel focuses on his team

Predictably, Jeff Capel didn’t want to talk Monday about Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim’s charge that Pitt, Miami and Wake Forest “bought” their teams.

With Pitt’s next game Tuesday night against Louisville at Petersen Events Center, Capel’s mind is far from the name, image and likeness question and what an opposing coach might think about how Pitt’s team was constructed.

“I have no reaction to (Boeheim’s charge),” Capel said Monday on the ACC coaches’ weekly conference call. “Everyone’s entitled to their opinion of what they think.”

He said, however, that he did not discuss NIL with transfers Nelly Cummings, Blake Hinson and Greg Elliott when he was recruiting them. Capel pointed out that Pennsylvania law at the time prohibited schools from having involvement with NIL deals.

“You had a guy from Colgate (Cummings). A guy who hadn’t played for two years in Blake Hinson, and a guy who had never really started at Marquette (Elliott, 11 starts in four seasons),” Capel said. “So it never really was a conversation that we had during our time recruiting them.”

He added he doesn’t think too long about how college athletics and NIL will co-exist in the future.

“I’m just going by what they tell us we can do now. That’s it,” he said. “I haven’t really thought about NIL that much. I’m trying to think about our team and how we can get better.”

Capel said he has spoken with Boeheim since the Syracuse coach leveled those charges in a conversation Saturday with ESPN college basketball writer Pete Thamel.

But he declined to offer details.

“That’s between me and coach Boeheim,” Capel said.

Statement from Coach Boeheim pic.twitter.com/MPwig9m6eu

— Syracuse Men’s Basketball (@Cuse_MBB) February 6, 2023

Boeheim apologized through Thamel and through a tweet posted Monday by the Syracuse men’s basketball account. He also spoke to Wake Forest coach Steve Forbes. He didn’t mention Miami’s Jim Larranaga, who did not participate in the conference call because the Hurricanes had a game Monday night against Duke.

Said Forbes: “There are very few people who respects coach (Boeheim) more than I do. I’ve said it publicly. He contacted me 2:30 (Sunday) morning. We coaches stay up late. I’m fine with coach. I like him. I respect him. I think the world of him.”

Boeheim, who was suspended nine games in 2015 because of violations involving academic misconduct, extra benefits and Syracuse’s drug testing policy, answered NIL questions Monday, emphasizing that every deal of which he is aware are “legal and within the rules 100%.”

“It has changed college basketball,” he said.

Boeheim said his son, Buddy Boeheim, who played for his dad at Syracuse, was involved with 20 different NIL groups.

“That’s, obviously, the future of basketball. It’s only going to grow. That’s basically what I was talking about, the ability with NIL and the transfer portal to change your team overnight. I’ll let somebody else decide whether that’s good or bad. That’s reality.”

But he said there might not be a solution to problems created by NIL and the portal, especially now that schools’ boosters are involved.

“I’ve been in this game 50 years. Some people think too long,” Boeheim said. “Every problem we’ve faced over those 50 years, there’s been a solution, things we’ve figured out. There is no solution for this. There is a call for Congress (to get involved). That’s the craziest.

“The transfer portal is good for kids and it can be bad, but it’s here and players should have that opportunity. The NIL is here, and it’s good.”

Notre Dame coach Mike Brey, 63, said the current climate in college basketball is one reason he has decided to retire at the end of the season after 23 years as head coach of the Irish.

“I’m really worried that we’re headed down that road fast of employer-employee,” he said, “the student-athletes are employees and really distancing them even more from the educational mission.”

Brey said he has argued against the immediate transfer rule, thinking that transfers are best served by sitting out a year before competing.

“I thought that was kind of healthy,” he said. “It helped the kids academically. I actually transferred. I sat out a year at George Washington. It was great for me.

“Now with the immediate transfer, the biggest issue is not all the credits transferring. And now you’ll have young men whose eligibility runs out and they don’t graduate.”

Boeheim made the point in his Saturday comments those forces drove coaches Jay Wright and Mike Krzyzewski into retirement.

Brey didn’t mention Wright and Krzyzewski, but he said, “If you decide to coach in this atmosphere, you better be equipped to do it. The current climate was definitely part of (why he decided to retire). Not a major part of it, but when you looked at moving forward and how to manage it, it was exhausting, quite frankly. Managing that within the mission of the University of Notre Dame was complicated.

“When we’ve been on the road the past couple summers, a lot of the veteran (coaches) sit together at recruiting events, and we’ve discussed all this. We’ve been therapists for each other.”