Former Miami coach Jim Larranaga explained his abrupt resignation on Thursday as due at least in part over exhaustion of the changing climate in college athletics and the constant struggle of juggling NIL in addition to running a program. Larranaga, 75, said in a press conference announcing his decision that he finally felt he could no longer give in his role what he felt it deserved, prompting him to resign the day after Christmas and just five days removed from a home loss to Mount St. Mary’s that dropped the team to 4-8.
“There’s one thing you’ve got to constantly ask yourself: Are you going to give everything you have — the commitment it deserves, 100% of yourself physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually?” Larranaga said. “Quite frankly, I’ve tried to do that through my life and my time here. But I’m exhausted. I’ve tried every which way to keep this going.”
Larranaga and Miami made the Final Four in 2023 for the first time in school history, but neither the program nor its leader experienced the joy of that run for long. Thursday, he said the fallout of that run was so severe — and yet typical of the current landscape in college athletics — that it forced him to rethink things as head coach.
“What shocked me was after we made it to the Final Four, just 18 months ago, the very first time I met with the players, eight of them decided they were going to put their name in the portal and leave,” Larrangaga said. “I said, ‘Don’t you like it here?’ They said, ‘No, I like it here, it’s great.’ But the opportunity to make money someplace else created a situation that you have to begin to ask yourself, as a coach, what is this all about? The answer is that it’s become professional.”
The roster exodus following the Final Four run was one of many things to take place in recent years that prompted Larranaga to ultimately consider stepping down. He said the loss to Mount St. Mary’s on Dec. 21, which gave the school its worst start since 1992, was “one of an accumulation of events that occurred” from right after the Final Four. After the loss Saturday, he tried to put his head around what it’d look like to step away.
It also forced Larranaga in the last few years to process and try to spin forward what he wants to see college athletics become in the NIL era. There is no putting the genie back in the bottle as far as the professionalization of college, and Larranaga himself expressed no issues with that idea. However, the carrying out of professionalization — particularly the transparency, or lack thereof — is what he feels needs most improved.
“Let’s pay them a reasonable salary,” he said. “Make it professional, and make it transparent.
“In many situations, the person would tell you something, and you’d find out later, no, that’s not really accurate. You don’t know who is telling the truth because there’s no transparency.”
The lack of transparency has been a sticking point among current and former college coaches about NIL, with Larranaga joining retired Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski among those calling for reform to the model as it is currently constructed.
“Going into this year, I felt like, ‘OK, we need to get back to where we were.'” he said. “I have a great group of kids, so it’s not their problem. It’s the system now — or the lack of a system. I didn’t know how to navigate through this.”
