Seton Hall went 21-12 this season. The Pirates won enough games to earn invitations to the NIT, the CBI, and the College Basketball Crown — the three postseason tournaments available to teams that miss the NCAA field. Shaheen Holloway declined all of them.
His reasoning was not about rest or scheduling or a philosophical objection to consolation tournaments. It was about survival. Holloway told reporters that playing additional postseason games would put his players on national television, in front of scouts and agents and rival coaching staffs, and every one of those exposures would become a recruiting opportunity for someone else's program. "I'm sure they approached them already," Holloway said, his voice carrying the flat resignation of a man who has accepted that the system is rigged against him but refuses to pretend otherwise. "That's just kind of where this is."
He left the decision to his players, and they chose to stop playing. Not because they didn't want to compete — because they understood, as Holloway did, that competing in a postseason tournament had become a talent showcase for the programs trying to poach them. The most radical act of roster protection in college basketball this season was not a creative contract clause or an NIL bidding war. It was a head coach telling his team to go home.
Seton Hall declined every postseason invitation to protect its roster from being poached
The Shadow Market
Holloway's protest is remarkable not because of what it reveals, but because of what everyone in college basketball already knows and nobody with institutional authority is willing to say out loud: the transfer portal's no-contact rules are treated as suggestions, and tampering is endemic.
Travis Steele, the Miami (OH) coach whose team went undefeated in the MAC regular season, described the phenomenon with a specificity that should alarm anyone who believes the current system is functional. "In January, all these agents started hitting me up saying, 'Hey, you need to sign me,'" Steele told reporters. "I don't have an agent — my wife is my agent, and she gets 100 percent commission." The joke landed, but the underlying reality was not funny. Steele went on to explain how the poaching actually works: "They don't necessarily call your guy directly. What they'll do is have somebody reach out — an AAU coach, a mentor, or an agent — to try to pry a kid into the portal. They'll say something like, 'Hey, XYZ university said they'll give you $300,000 if you enter the portal.' That type of stuff clouds these kids' minds. It's difficult to deal with. It's definitely happening, and it's rampant in our business."
Steele made a pact with his players when the interest started circulating, asking them to stay focused through the season and deal with everything in the offseason. It worked — his team stayed together through the conference tournament. But he harbors no illusions about the system he is operating in. "It's a sh---y part of the business, it's ugly," he said. "But, you know who created it? We created it. The coaches and administrators, we created this beast, and it's an embarrassment."
An agent working in the portal space put it more bluntly: "I hate to say it, but the rules are a suggestion at this point."
The Clemson Warning
The most concrete evidence of tampering this cycle comes from football, but the mechanism is identical across sports and the precedent should terrify every basketball coach holding together a roster on good faith and modest NIL budgets.
Clemson's Dabo Swinney alleged that Ole Miss coach Pete Golding tampered with linebacker Luke Ferrelli, a player who had already signed a revenue-sharing contract with Clemson. Ferrelli was attending classes, working out with the team, and had signed paperwork. Then he received texts about his buyout amount and photos of a lucrative contract offer from Ole Miss, and within days he had reversed course and signed with the Rebels. The College Sports Commission has confirmed that investigations into unreported or non-compliant NIL deals connected to portal recruiting are already underway, but investigations move slowly, and by the time they produce findings, the rosters have already been rebuilt.
The structural incentive is obvious: the penalty for tampering — if it is ever actually enforced — is vastly outweighed by the competitive advantage of securing a player early. A program that waits until April 7 to contact targets is a program that has already lost the bidding war to one that started in February.
The Multi-Year Contract Counter-Measure
Some programs are fighting back with contract structures borrowed from professional sports. Multi-year revenue-sharing agreements now include buyout clauses that create financial friction for players who want to leave — if a player signs a two-year deal worth $1.5 million with a $500,000 buyout to leave early, the cost of entering the portal is no longer zero.
The approach has already created controversy. The Demond Williams saga at Washington illustrated the risks on both sides: the 19-year-old quarterback signed a $4 million revenue-sharing contract, then announced days later that he was entering the portal. His agent dropped him. Washington prepared legal action. Williams reversed course, telling reporters, "Definitely being 19, you get good advice and you get really bad advice at times. We're all human. We all make mistakes." He stayed, but the incident exposed the tension between contractual obligation and the portal's premise of player freedom. When a teenager can sign a binding financial document and then try to walk away from it within a week, the system is producing outcomes that satisfy no one.
What Holloway Understood
Shaheen Holloway is not a naïve man. He coached at Seton Hall, in the Big East, in a media market saturated with basketball programs competing for the same players and the same donor dollars. He went 21-12 and missed the NCAA Tournament and knew that his best players were already being courted by programs that could offer more money, more exposure, and a postseason stage he could not provide. His response was to deny those programs the stage entirely.
It was a protest, and like most protests, it was more symbolic than practical. Declining a postseason invitation does not prevent agents from calling. It does not stop AAU coaches from whispering dollar figures in a player's ear during a pickup game. It does not change the fundamental economics of a system where a mid-major program operating on $2 million in NIL is trying to retain players against schools spending $10 million or more.
But it named the problem in a way that nobody else has been willing to. The transfer portal is supposed to be a window — a defined period during which players can explore their options through a regulated, transparent process. In practice, it is a year-round shadow market where the window is largely decorative and the real transactions happen in back channels, through intermediaries, months before the portal officially opens. Holloway looked at that reality, decided that participating in additional games would only accelerate the poaching of his roster, and chose the only form of resistance available to him: he walked away from the court.
The portal opens April 7. The conversations started in January. Shaheen Holloway just said what everyone already knew.