Travis Steele made pact with RedHawks

The Miami RedHawks have been the darling of this college basketball season, finishing the regular season as the last unbeaten team in men’s Division I. Miami, led by head coach Travis Steele, will face the SMU Mustangs in the First Four round of the NCAA tournament on Wednesday night after earning a rare at-large bid as a mid-major.

However, the unfortunate reality of the current collegiate athletics landscape is that the RedHawks players and coaches are going to be recruited by other programs. Luckily, a special bond between Steele and his players allowed a pact to be made.

“It’s like the elephant in the room,” Steele told Dan Dakich of Outkick. “In January, all these agents started hitting me up, saying, ‘Hey, you need to sign me.’ I don’t have an agent — my wife is my agent, and she gets 100 percent commission.'”

“I told our guys, if I’m getting hit up, I know you’re getting hit up,” he continued. “With success, guys are going to try to pull us apart. I made a pact with them then — let’s just deal with it in the offseason. Let’s stay true to the journey. Let’s stay together and not let anything get between us and this ride.”

Steele isn’t naive about the ralities of tampering.

“Our guys have done that, but I’m not naïve enough to think it’s not happening. I know people are tampering. It’s just part of the business.

“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.”

It’ll be interesting to see what kind of noise the RedHawks end up making in the tournament.