MIAMI — The changing face of major college athletics is a snarling one with sharp teeth and a ravenous appetite. It is eating up and spitting out coaches of a generation when things were slower, simpler. The latest victim: Jim Larranaga from the University of Miami men’s basketball team.

College sports at the highest level is cannibalizing itself with the transfer portal and name, image and likeness cash flow that has brought tumult and turmoil to top programs in football and basketball, where the money is made and where athletes now chase their share.

“After more than 50 years in college coaching, it is simply time,” Larranaga said Thursday. “There is never a great moment to step away, but I owe it to our student-athletes, our staff and the University of Miami to make this move now when my heart is simply no longer in the game.”

Larranaga turned 75 two month ago. He gave more than half of his life, 41 years, to coaching. Less than two years ago he was dancing on top of the world or close enough to see it, leading the Canes to their first NCAA Final Four appearance.

But two years is a long time ago with the warp-speed changes in the college game. Long enough for a man to lose his heart for what he always loved. Veteran assistant Bill Courtney takes over as interim coach the remainder of this season.

“I’m exhausted,” Larranaga said. “I’ve tried every which way to keep this going.”

Said UM athletic director Dan Radakovich: “Coaching in 2024 is a much different profession than it was just a few short years ago.”

This is telling: “The University,” Larranaga said, “needs a new leader of the program, one who is both adept at and embracing of the new world of intercollegiate athletics.”

That is a veteran coach admitting with great candor that he has aged out of his profession — no longer “adept” at all that is required but more more importantly not “embracing” of his sport’s demanding “new world.”

That means the transfer portal, NIL money and all the other stuff that has turned the job of coaching beyond seasons and into 12-month grinds. Larranaga saw eight players, who all said they were happy in Miami, enter the transfer portal after UM went to the ‘23 Final Four.

“The opportunity to make money someplace else created a situation that you begin to ask yourself as a coach what is this all about,” Larranaga said. “The answer is it’s become professional.”

Done in the midst of his 14th year in Coral Gables, Larranaga joins other top coaches of his generation who have stepped away in recent years, including Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski, North Carolina’s Roy Williams and Syracuse’s Jim Boeheim.

Across the college aisle in football, Nick Saban left Alabama.

At Larranaga’s own school, Miami’s longtime women’s coach, Katie Meier, stepped away after last season at age 57 following her 19th year at UM. She and Larranaga retire as the school’s winningest women’s and men’s basketball coach of all time.

Sports news does not take the holidays off.

It was the day after Christmas when Larranaga’s abrupt, unexpected midseason resignation jarred South Florida.

Across town Heat coach Erik Spoelstra, a friend, called himself “shocked” and “stunned” by Larranaga’s decision.

Spo himself is dealing with his own in-season drama. ESPN reported this week that Heat star Jimmy Butler prefers to be traded out of Miami before the NBA’s Feb. 6 deadline. Heat president Pat Riley in turn issued a brief, blunt response on Thursday, saying, “We are not trading Jimmy Butler.”

At the top of Miami football, the Dolphins and Hurricanes prepare for weekend games in hopes of salvaging seasons gone wrong.

The Fins must win in Cleveland on Sunday and hope for other favorable results to keep alive slim NFL playoffs hopes.

The Canes once were 9-0 but blew a spot in the ACC championship game and College Football Playoff by losing two of their last three. Now, Saturday, UM is relegated to the ignominy of the Pop-Tarts Bowl.

Amid all of this, Jim Larranaga calls it quits, beaten, but with head held high, as it should be.

This man was 274-174 in his 14 seasons here, with 14 NCAA Tournament appearances, four Sweet 16s, the program’s first Elite Eight in 2022 and first Final Four in ‘23. Also true, alas, Larranaga departs 4-8 this season, and having lost 18 of his last 22 games dating to last year.

The larger sad truth is that hardly anybody gets to go out on top in sports.

In Larranaga’s case, just two or three years removed from his best days at Miami — the postgame lockerroom dancing days — a good man is chased into retirement by social media vitriol calling him too old, and by wholesale changes in his sport that made him feel like maybe he was.

Jim Larranaga came to a football school and he leaves having made basketball matter as the Canes’ winningest men’s coach ever.

He leaves with a record of integrity unblemished.

He leaves on his own terms, not forced out but by his own heart telling him it was time.

©2024 Miami Herald. Visit miamiherald.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.