What’s next? A college-basketball player interrupting the coach in a key timeout to inform him he’s got a better offer? The quarterback trotting off the field on third-and-goal on the would-be winning drive, checking out for a bigger payday?

These days in college sports, it’s all about the bag.

The preceding is preamble to the lightning bolt Saturday that Gonzaga point guard Mario Saint-Supery is outta there, leaving Spokane and a sophomore year of promise at GU to sign with Valencia, Spain, of the EuroLeague.

This happened on July 10 and is said to have stunned the Zag coaches. It’s not an ideal time to go hunting for a new lead guard who can play at a national-championship level, the vicinity of where Gonzaga was thought to be in 2026-27.

Seven years ago, I happened to run into Mark Few, the Zags coach, at a Spokane restaurant. It was spring, and his staff was hosting a transfer recruit.

“Everything’s changed,” he said, a little wistfully. He was talking about a spring schedule once dotted with fishing trips now filled with on-the-fly recruiting responsibilities.

Little did Few know, seven years ago was the good old days.

That was before the transfer portal heated up, before name/image/likeness brought riches to collegians. And just when it seemed like perhaps Gonzaga had begun to reckon adequately with the new world order, now comes a new level of madness.

You spend a couple or three years scouting, wooing and signing a player who seems to slot into the vision you have for the position, and when, out of the blue he takes a powder, you’re left with a few weeks to replace him. While summer workouts are already starting at your school.

I’m not here to lambaste a kid for taking a reported $15 million over four years in Spain (although one can make a case that if playing in the NBA is a goal, Saint-Supery could also have bet on himself and reasonably risen to first-round draft status next spring).

It’s just that today’s chaos serves to squeeze out the notion of any shred of commitment and loyalty, elements that always described successful programs.

Yes, athletes were always shorted in the equation of big-time college sports. The coaches made increasingly startling cash on the backs of the players, and coaches could cut and run while the players were left entangled in things like redshirt years if they transferred.

Now that dynamic is changing. But it’s surely ironic that in his dash of free agency, Saint-Supery jilts Few, who will shortly begin his 28th season as head coach at Gonzaga, somebody who has turned his back on offers or feelers of probably 90 percent of the best programs in the country.

That’s not the only irony here. Gonzaga was once at the collegiate vanguard of capitalizing on talent overseas. This spring has been pure hell on that front for the Zags, who had also signed guard Jack Kayil of Germany before he opted to stay in the NBA draft.

So our little corner of the country might lead the nation in head-slapping developments around the new mores of college sports. It was only in January that Washington quarterback Demond Williams agreed to a new NIL deal at Washington – before announcing a couple of days later he was joining the transfer portal, so he could check out an overture from the always-circumspect Lane Kiffin at LSU.

The Huskies sat Williams down and explained that, uh, they had a contract with him, and he’s back. They had a subsequent press conference and essentially shrugged the whole thing off, as if Williams had just missed a practice with a sore throat.

We live in strange times. Better, in some ways, but not quite ideal, either.