MORGANTOWN — As a guest of the Final Fourcast podcast, former WVU men’s hoops player Jalen Bridges poured his heart out over the airways in his attempt to explain his reasons for entering the transfer portal and ultimately ending up at Baylor.
He was honest, and maybe more importantly, forthcoming, while giving a behind-the-scenes glimpse into what led to his decision.
Ultimately all Bridges accomplished, though, was confirming just how much of a different era of college athletics we’re living in.
For the next few minutes, I beg of you to try and be objective and stand in the middle of the issues, and look at both sides.
This is a different era. That doesn’t mean it’s bad or wrong; doesn’t mean that the 1,300 or so players in the men’s hoop portal are going to kill college athletics; aren’t transferring for legitimate reasons; or will become the cause of your favorite coach getting the boot.
It also doesn’t mean that a lot of those athletes in the portal aren’t in there for the wrong reasons, whether they’ve been sold a bill of goods from some shady characters or are just plain selfish, with their eyes on some sort of greener pasture that likely will not be found.
Having said this, Bridges is not to be thought of as some sort of poster child for what is wrong with college athletics. He is far from being that guy.
The day before he announced he was transferring, Bridges was intelligent, likable and funny. He is still all of those things after transferring, too.
Still, many of his words he chose seem like a sort of echo that had long-ago been stated by the thousands and thousands of transfers that came before him.
“I’d rather be taught than just yelled at,” Bridges said. “I can take yelling if there’s teaching, too. I’m not saying there was no teaching, it was just they’d rather yell at you and put you on the treadmill rather than show you what to do and how to fix it and not make that same mistake again. It’s like a punishment over trying to get better.”
Later on, Bridges hinted at he was being misused in Bob Huggins’ offense.
“Everybody talking about me like I’m a big. I ain’t ever been a damn big my entire life,” he said. “I was a shooting guard in high school. “I felt in the offense I had to hunt shots and that’s not me, never been me. I had to force shots up to get a look.”
There are literally a thousand other players in that portal with the same story, and this is the heart of the issue between the players who love the freedom to transfer and the coaches and fans who grow to despise the portal even more with each passing day.
Huggins is not the first coach to be accused of being out of touch with today’s college athlete or not being able to develop them properly.
He won’t be the last, either.
The truth of the matter lies somewhere in the middle, and the problem is it’s a middle that is rarely met by either player or coach.
I have no doubt Bridges felt he could have played a little differently, maybe showcased something he had spent month after month working on.
There is no doubt that a difficult season that saw two different seven-game losing streaks and just four Big 12 wins wore heavily on Bridges’ mental state.
“It’s going to be the same elsewhere, but those two seven-game losing streaks and the negativity with it just made a bad situation worse,” Bridges said. “Y’all could tell, we was checked out. You could see it on our face.
“We had team meetings. We broke it down. It was like break ‘em down, then build it back up, but you are forgetting to build us back up. You guys are just drilling us. If you all are telling us we’re not this and we’re not that and it’s not working, why not switch it up and try a different approach?”
The flip side to it all is not to point out Huggins’ Hall-of-Fame resumé, but simply to look at the number of kids who have been developed by him and his coaches.
To simply believe a blanket statement that Huggins has lost the ability to develop athletes is no more true than believing Bridges is soft or can’t hack it as a college athlete when neither, obviously, is true.
The middle is maybe it takes a certain type of kid to flourish under Huggins’ guidance and Bridges — as well as others who have transferred out of the program — simply just wasn’t that kid.
That doesn’t make one of them wrong or right. It certainly doesn’t point to some type of scandal, where the program is being run improperly.
It’s really nothing more than a frustrated young man looking to find a different path to take his life’s journey. He has that right. That’s the era we are in.
There’s nothing wrong with what Bridges believes. It’s just his story is one that has been told so many times before and is shared by so many others in the portal.
And for the fans of college athletics, it’s a story that is quickly becoming tiresome.
TWEET @bigjax3211
