![Tennessee Vols Head Coach Rick Barnes Benched His Star Player Because He Didn’t “Do What He’s Being Paid To Do”]()
![Rick Barnes Tennessee]()
The "NIL Era" of college sports takes some getting used to.
Remember when you'd turn on college games, whether it be football or basketball, and all of the players were just competing for the pride of their school? Those days are long gone, and the beginning of the end officially started when the NCAA ruled that student athletes could profit off of their name, image and likeness in 2021.
So now, through that, it's not out of the normal to see college athletes driving around in fancy cars, or forcing themselves out of a university because another across the country with better NIL fundraising is offering them more money. It's still considered amateur sports, but NIL is slowly but surely turning college athletics into an unofficial semi-pro league.
That's not all bad. Some say it's leveled the playing field a bit, and teams that used to be dynastic are now competing more closely with teams that used to be bottom feeders. Others say that it's taken away the heart of college sports, and that it also hurts "smaller schools" because their stars are handpicked out of the transfer portal by bigger schools during the offseason.
And yesterday, we saw one of the first examples of a college athlete being benched because they weren't "doing the job they were paid to do."
Longtime college basketball coach Rick Barnes, who has coached the University of Tennessee since 2015, took NIL matters into his own hands yesterday in a game that saw Tennessee beat Texas 74 to 70.
Tennessee star Chaz Lanier was surprisingly subbed out only 11 seconds into the second half, and it was hard not to notice the quick substitution. It didn't appear that he had done anything wrong in the game, but Barnes was livid and yanked his star. Chaz later returned to the game, so it seemed as though the UT head coach was just sending a message to his young player.
After the game, the media asked Barnes what that message was, and he proudly shared that he pulled Lanier out because he didn't do the job that he's actually getting paid to do:
"I took him out the first play of the second half because he didn’t shoot the ball. That play was designed for that shot. And I told him, I said, 'If you’re not going to do what you’re getting paid to do, you sit over here.'
Because he is getting paid to do that."
https://twitter.com/TreyWallace_/status/1878279692643443103
Hey... seems fair to me.
Still though, it's weird to hear a college coach say that he pulled one of his guys out of the lineup because they weren't fulfilling the duties of their paycheck. I respect Rick Barnes for holding Chaz Lanier accountable. After all, the star player is making $100,000 at the very least. If he's supposed to shoot the ball, he's gotta shoot the ball.
College basketball fans were mixed on the whole situation, with some saying things like this are just part of the modern game, while others claimed that the NIL era is ruining the sport in real time:
