The Wild West of College Sports has Officially Kicked In with Passing of Transfer Rule

Welcome to the wild west of college sports.

The sheriff is nowhere to be found.

The NCAA, supposed to be the organization enforcing the laws, decided it was a lost cause to continue fighting the problem. If you can’t beat them, join them, right?

On April 16, the NCAA figured it was too big of a problem to be stopped. Either the transfer rules were changed across the nation, or each individual conference would slowly do it. Both options had the same result.

College athletes used to have to sit out for one year at their new destination, as long as they were an underclassmen, after transferring. Now, a one-time transfer rule was approved, meaning an athlete can transfer wherever he or she wants to, and play immediately, one time as an undergraduate during their collegiate career. That was added in addition to a previous rule issued by the NCAA allowing graduate students with remaining eligibility to transfer and join their new program’s active roster upon arrival.

It seems the landscape of college sports continues to shift as the weeks pass by. College athletes could begin receiving pay this fall, and now they have the ability to jump ship from school to school.

Also, under new rules by the AAC, ACC, and MAC, student-athletes from within the conference can transfer to another school within that same conference and earn immediate eligibility.

Here’s the thing. There is no reason to force athletes to stay at a school that does not fit for them. That’s why Div. III works so well. Athletes can transfer from any school, at any place in the country, and play immediately at a Div. III program. But Div. III is not the same as Div. I, where money, professional scouts, and selfish, me-first attitudes are evident and seem to be put ahead of the betterment of the team.

The way this rule was proposed, it makes you believe that it will be much-needed relief for all those athletes who attend one school, but decide to transfer because of issues within the program, or who realize they aren’t a good fit. Never mind that there’s a waiver process for those kinds of situations, the majority of which are approved. During the 2018-19 year, 66 percent of transfer waiver requests were approved by the NCAA, and that number was a slight drop from the previous four years.

Instead, this one-time transfer rule is simply the NCAA conforming to the selfish attitude now prevalent in “big-time” college sports. As UConn head women’s basketball coach Geno Auriemma noted a few years ago when talking about this same subject, far too many athletes nowadays enter college with the mentality of, “If I’m not playing, why should I be happy?”

Gone are the days that the athletes played for pride and glory, to represent their school and community. Now, that is not to say that every college athlete has this approach, but it is becoming increasingly more common with the expansion of AAU and travel/club sports, where the focus is more on how many hits you had, or how many points you scored, rather than if your team won.

Unfortunately, it is not hard to see what this transfer rule will turn into: an out for every five-star recruit who gets to his or her college destination and is not starting the first game of the season.

Soon, it seems, the amount of athletes in the transfer portal will become so big, it will be impossible to keep up with. We saw a small preview of this during this spring, as all basketball players earned an additional year of eligibility from the NCAA. According to Adam Zagoria, writing for The New York Times, there were 1400 men and 1000 women in college basketball’s transfer portal last week.

While it seems the floodgates can’t be held back any longer, and the rule has good intentions at its core, the doors are now wide open to a musical chairs of sorts in college sports, with higher roster turnover and players moving schools at least once if not twice (once as an underclassman, once following graduation).

We’ll see how it works out.