The Portal Complicates Baseball's Ideal Setup - Today's Take

Inside Carolina’s senior reporter Greg Barnes on the college baseball landscape and the beneficial way the NCAA handles the professional pathway. Still, the transfer portal rules remain a major challenge for college coaches.

“For the longest time, I’ve always thought baseball had the best setup with regard to the draft. If you are good enough to go pro straight out of high school, go. Have at it. No one should be able to take that option way from you. But if you decide to come to a school like North Carolina, then it’s a three-year commitment – age plays a factor, so there scenarios with draft-eligible sophomores.

“When you go to school, there’s a real commitment. As Hubert Davis always said on the basketball side, you need to unpack your bags — that commitment and rule provides for that to happen. That’s very beneficial not only for players to settle in and develop but for coaches to have some stability year over year.

“The portal impacts that in a negative way, and it’s going to be continue to be a challenge until we see some of this legislation that’s been suggested at the congressional level and transfer limits put in place. I’ll believe it when I see it.

“The new scholarship limits help with taking care of the kids and making sure they don’t leave with debt, as opposed to the old 11.7 scholarship limit. Now it’s three times as much scholarship money, which is a massive benefit when it comes to helping sports like baseball. So I’m curious, now that scholarships are fully part of the deal, at what point do you start seeing more NIL opportunities come in above scholarship?

If you remove the portal from the conversation, pretty much everybody on roster can have a scholarship now and you have the pro decision of either you go after high school or you come to school for three years. If just that was in place, everybody would be ecstatic. But it is filtering in the portal stuff that complicates that because you have peers trying to poach those players.”