The overwhelming key to the NBA is to have a savvy agent. The college coach isn’t going to advise you on how to spend your money or live your life after your gone. It’s the agent’s job to do that or hire a good financial advisor. The NBA tries to educate rookies on spending habits and the NBA life. Trey picked his dad, with no experience, and his cousin, who has represented some NFL players, to guide him. Jordan Dumars and another recent UM grad were chosen to provide financial management - again, no experience. I do not see how Michigan bears any responsibility for Trey’s current financial condition.
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Trey Burke’s full comments on Michigan, being unprepared for NBA life shed light on NCAA experience
@chezaroo: Just popped in here to post that article! You are on it with the BQ articles. Nicely done.
Here’s the full quote:
"I think when I first came in (to college), I came in strictly with the student mentality. I knew I someday wanted to be a professional basketball player. But coming in I wasn’t a McDonald’s All-American. I wasn’t a – ‘Oh, he’s going to be a No. 1 draft pick’ – or – ‘He’s going to leave early.’
"(Michigan was) preaching four years, staying four years. I believed that, too. But after my freshman year, we lost my first game in the tournament and – my freshman year, I had a year that people didn’t expect me to have as a freshman – and you’re hearing things from the scouts, you’re hearing things from agents … and me being only 19 years old at the time, the things I was hearing, those were the things I wanted to hear, rather than the things I needed to hear. I started getting the real advice that I needed to hear after my freshman year from my coaches and my parents.
"It was just that one day, out of all of those days I know I wasn’t listening, and in my heart, I knew it was the right decision to come back. So when I came back my sophomore year, like, everyone at the university kind of knew I was checked out – what I would call it. And as an athlete, when you’re kind of checked out, you already have in your mind that your an NBA player, but you’re in college. You know, some guys just don’t go to class. Other go to class. I still went to class and, on top of that, they checked my classes, so I knew I had to go to class.
“Long story short, I felt like, personally, they could have helped me structure what I was going into – as far as finances, as far as budgeting, as far as investing. I didn’t know anything about any of those things. All I knew was basketball. And I felt like, at that point, me being a sophomore at that point in my career as a student-athlete, I think they kind of knew that I was going to declare, especially when we went deep into the tournament. I still hadn’t told the media or still hadn’t told anyone, but I was making it known that I want to enter the draft, and I don’t feel like I was equipped enough going into the process, and I feel like they could have helped me more with me building a team for what I wanted, rather than an agent coming in and telling me all this knowledge and things.”
Well…let’s see. Trey’s two comments were that the food was so bad he sometimes didn’t eat breakfast, and that Beilein should have helped him with budgeting. I guess, by your lack of comment, that we’re no longer discussing Beilein’s possible culpability with regard to the food, so that leaves us with budgeting.
Trey came back because he was not a guaranteed first round choice after his freshman year. He played himself into the first round as a sophomore. While first round salaries are set, they wary markedly from the top of the first round (about $15 million over 3 years, with about a $6.25 million dollar 4th year option and about a $7 million qualifying offer) to the bottom (about $3 million over 3 years, with about a $1.8 million 4th year option and about a $2.7 million qualifying offer). Even within the lottery, the difference between, say, the #9 pick (where Trey wound up) and the #14 pick (bottom of the lottery) is about $1.5 million over 3 years. How, exactly, is a basketball coach, or anyone else for that matter, supposed to tell someone how to budget an income which can’t reasonably be estimated within 1/2 million per year (not to mention differences in state taxes depending on who drafts the player)?
If you’re saying that universities and coaches, including Beilein, should help to pre-screen agents/attorneys/financial advisors for athletes going pro, I agree 100%. I don’t know whether that occurred–if it didn’t, then that’s at least in part on Beilein. I do know that Trey didn’t go with a conventional agent/attorney to represent him–he chose his father who had never before done this. I can’t imagine how Beilein could have, or should have, stopped this, and how, if he had tried, this wouldn’t have been used to negatively recruit him to parents forever.
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We don’t even know what “personal issues” are from Burke’s quote. For all we know, he thought the breakfast was a “personal issue” that JB should have handled. Or it could have been something that JB should have dealt with. We don’t know. You’re sure quick to rush to judgement.
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The full quotes don’t change anything for me. In fact, the bit about having no9thing when he came to Arbor Arbor, i.e. he was from a poor family, is further nonsense. He came from an average middle class family. Putting aside the athletes pay issue, his parents were capable of giving him some extra cash if need be.
Coach cannot “figure out” a way to give Trey food more to his liking. See NCAA rules. That’s his personal issue, as he described it, but it’s the one that coach cannot solve. I’m sure that he could talk to any one of the coaches about a real personal issue.
Is he saying that his dad, his cousin, Jordan Dumars and his partner all gave him bad or no advice on budgeting his money? Did he ask for advice? Wouldn’t he hire his dad and cousin no matter what?
Talk about biting the hand that feeds you. If he doesn’t like the food at UM wait till he gets his first overseas contract, which is where he’s heading if he doesn’t get it together at the NBA level. He’s not going to like the food there any better. Trey is just a boy who thinks he’s a man, whining about things that are out of the coach’s realm of responsibility. Beilein’s in his 60’s working 60-70 hours a week. He doesn’t need to do anything else. If Trey wanted to learn about budgeting and investing he should have started here: http://www.bus.umich.edu/Courses/default.aspx
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I think Trey is not specifically trying to say anything negative about UM. Rather, I think he is drawing on his own experience to say something general: College sports are not that great of a deal for the scholarship athlete. Most would have been better off just going to classes, taking out student loans,and working part time and occasionally going to the gym to play a pick up game. I think his point, which he does a horrible job articulating is that everyone knew he was going to the NBA and that he would need skills for handling the money. These are relatively easy skills to obtain and yet he was still ill prepared even with the advantage of all that money…So, if the university fails to prepare an athlete, like himself, who is thrown into a best case scenario, then we can assume that universities also fail the vast majority of athletes who do not become pro athletes.
Maybe I am being too forgiving in my interpretation? I am not completely sure what he is trying to say…
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Most wouldn’t have even had the opportunity to go to their school otherwise…
Yeah, I don’t think Trey did any favors to himself or the cause of paying athletes – really, JB is supposed to figure out how to replicate Mrs. Burke’s eggs?
As for agent vetting, you really want to encourage college coaches to “vet” agents? And my guess is part of the financial issue is that Trey thought that when he made it to the NBA he was set for life, that an agent didn’t do anything but collect the 4% - but then maybe things weren’t quite as easy as he imagined.
Maybe Michigan could and should do more to help athletes (and students in general) prepare for budgeting post-college, but it also seems that Trey is still a 23-year old young man learning about some of the difficulties and uncertainties of adult life and kind of wishing there was a magic solution to avoid them.
The good thing for his sake is he’s got a good profession where he’ll make a very good salary for quite a while, he’s a hard worker, and I think he’ll do just fine.
Hiring his father as an agent probably wasn’t the best move either. Managing money is the hardest thing to do when all of a sudden you are given the amount he was given. My guess is that he has allowed his father to handle some of his finances.
You live and learn from these type of situations. Maybe he can help future athletes at UM with these things. Too many times athletes don’t want to hear anything that is said to them. Too many athletes are “checked out” during the rookie symposiums that all have to attend.
When we give a college athlete access to a college that is beyond their academic abilities we are not doing then a huge favor. Just the opposite in my opinion. Fit is important.
Not only was it not Beilein’s or the U’s responsibility to steer him toward accounting and budgeting classes–his needs in this regard were pretty far from those of 99.9% of students–but how much crap would Beilein be in if he were helping Burke plan his NBA career while he was supposedly playing for his university? This is just not well thought out by Trey, who admits here that he wasn’t even formally telling Beilein he was GOING. Trey’s still young, and this is not his best look, but trying to justify this as if it were somehow Beilein’s error. . . won’t wash.
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Oh I never thought it’s his problem with food. Unless he’s capable of getting better training tables for his program and I am not sure that’s possible. I am sure other schools go above and beyond that though. You don’t tell them how to budget money with a difference of 700k etc… You make it clear while he’s going to be making a lot more money than most 21 year olds it still isn’t enough to be set for life. Maybe Beilein did that but as I said evidently this isn’t how Trey felt. Part of the issue imo is he likely wasn’t going to gain this knowledge in just 2 years. It’s more than likely it would take him at least 3-4 years to gain this knowledge. Of course then he leaves after his senior year better equipped but not a cent to his name. I believe Burke has other issues though such as trying to stick in the league beyond this year. His career has really fallen off a cliff
And yet the graduation rate of division 1 student athletes sits at 86% while the national average for 6 year graduation rate is 60%. Somehow I think we’re doing them a pretty huge favor.
What percentage of student athletes are allowed to slide through, without actually putting in the necessary class work? It is just my opinion, but getting a degree is not such a big deal. The big deal is the opportunity to expand your mind for 4 years. It is a lot of work but there is a huge payoff. I think it is almost impossible to put in the necessary academic work for an average student if they are required to also be in the gym/ playing games for over 30 hours a week. Some very energetic and bright people can do it. Not me, I needed about 65 hours a week but I am a slow reader and writer…
I don’t know how long ago you were in college but as a current student I can tell you that expanding your mind is not most university professors’ main priority right now (I don’t want to go into this further). But even if it wasn’t about the degree (which it mostly is) I don’t see how you can say it harms the athletes to graduate from there because they “didn’t expand their mind” significantly enough. Are you saying not going to college would allow them to do so?
Now the UNC side of me is of course just laughing that Michigan players have to go to class and stuff. I figure the two sides balance out to a normal level of dirtiness.
“Expanding your mind is not most university professors’ main priority right now”.
Haha. Good point.
I am saying, there are exceptions, but for the most part, in the long run, it is better to just take out loans and go to a school that is a good fit. That might mean going to a community college for a few years and transfer into a lower tier school. It might mean starting off at a lower teir school and transferring into a place like UM. It also might mean just going to UM and not playing sports. The college years often end up being a once in a lifetime academic experience…stuff later in life often gets in the way if going back… I hope you are not right about the state of Universities now–but you are right, it has been awhile for me.
Since you have divided loyalties, I’ve got to ask:
- If Michigan meets UNC in the ACC challenge, who you got?
- Seventh Woods or Xavier Simpson? Who would you rather have?
- As a follow up question, Tony Bradley or… actually, nevermind this one.
I still have a hard time believing that Beilein is absolved and somehow it doesn’t wash. Unless you’re Shabazz Napier very few players have been outspoken to the point of displeasure in the way they were treated during they stay as a collegiate basketball player. Maybe it just boils down to the fact that during Beilein’s career as a coach he hasn’t handled a lot of pro players and doesn’t necessarily know the mindset of those players. There is definitely a different mindset when it comes to players having their eyes set on the NBA and the ones that just want a 4 year degree and enjoy basketball.