Josh Pastner: NIL reluctance cost Georgia Tech its Final Four team

It has been five years since Georgia Tech basketball played in the NCAA Tournament and 22 seasons since the Yellow Jackets were in the Final Four.

Former Georgia Tech coach Josh Pastner, who led the Jackets to their most recent NCAA Tournament appearance and ACC Tournament title in 2021 (two years before he was fired) — attributes part of that to Tech’s reluctance to spend in name, image and likeness (NIL).

It’s a sure bet new Jackets coach Scott Cross and athletic director Ryan Alpert have a plan in mind for NIL and transfer portal dealings.

But six years ago under the previous administration, Pastner said that simply wasn’t the case.

“We’d won the ACC championship (in 2021), and NIL had just started, it was new, but we had a chance to keep the ACC player of the year (Moses Wright) and ACC defensive player of the year (Jose Alvarado) for a little money,” Pastner, how head coach at UNLV, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

“I think that next year, we could have gone to the Final Four.”

Instead, Wright and Alvarado declared for the NBA, and Georgia Tech basketball dropped off to the extent the Jackets’ haven’t had a winning season since.

Cross’ hire has brought optimism, with Tech aiming to regain relevance in the ACC and post a winning record for the first time since Pastner’s 2020-21 team went 17-9 and won the ACC tournament.

Pastner’s look back at the Yellow Jackets’ missed opportunity, originally on the 365 podcast, serves as a cautionary tale for the program as it looks to move on after Damon Stoudamire’s three-year tenure ended last season with an 11-20 record, including 2-16 in ACC play.

Pastner, who went 18-17 and reached the second round of the NIT in his first year as UNLV’s coach last season, said he understood where Tech was coming from with its conservative stance on NIL dealings at the time of the key players’ financial requests.

“It (NIL) was very new, and Georgia Tech at that time didn’t want to get involved in the NIL,” Pastner said. “It’s about academics there, and we used to say it’s a 40-year decision (on choosing to attend the school), not a four-year decision.

“(But) when those two players left, we had to start over; I didn’t have any money to give anyone.”

Pastner said that, in hindsight, he wishes he would have been more resourceful to fund the return of key players.

“At the time, I wasn’t going to go around my bosses,” said Pastner, who was working under former Georgia Tech athletic director Todd Stansbury.

“But if I knew then what I know now, you could go to different boosters and say ‘we have to find a way to make this work’ and at the time, it was legal.”

Pastner said the NIL waters run even deeper now, and he doesn’t believe the current model is sustainable.

“It’s not NIL anymore — it’s a pay to play deal, it’s where we’re at in the college landscape,” Pastner said. “The only two ways for there to be structure, and not so wild, is there has to be a federal law where all 50 states are under the same antitrust law, or there has to be a collective bargaining agreement for the players.

“Anything in between, we will have the same landscape because there will be lawsuits.”

Pastner said Georgia Tech’s return to prominence isn’t as easy as some outsiders suggest, in terms of simply recruiting well in the talent-rich Atlanta metropolitan area.

For one, Pastner said, during his tenure the academic standards were part of the player evaluation process in terms of the recruiting profile.

“Georgia Tech is or was different because of the academic component, but I don’t know how it is now,” Pastner said. “But we were the only Division I team playing football and baseball without a Bachelor of Arts; it was all Bachelor of Science.

“Everything was about science and math, and deservedly so, it’s a high-level engineering school.”

“The other thing about Atlanta, there were a lot of guys that were highly ranked in Atlanta that I didn’t take,” Pastner said. “I didn’t think they were good enough — and they weren’t good enough, as it turned out. Just because someone is ranked a certain place doesn’t mean they are good enough.”

Pastner said the same holds true for players who transfer through the portal, so talent evaluation is more important than ever.

“The difference between football and basketball is the (roster) numbers are so different that you can make some mistakes on the evaluation in football and still be OK,” Pastner said. “In basketball, you have to thread the needle on your talent evaluation, and if you don’t, you can have a bad year.

“You make one or two mistakes, it can really cost you.”

Cross has made it clear he and his staff are doing their homework with the transfer portal opening on Tuesday and running through April 21.