“Radical” Transfer Proposal Already Too-Limited, Outdated

If any institution in America can be credibly accused of always fighting the last battle, it’s the NCAA. As a conglomeration of what are ultimately academic institutions, by the time the NCAA gets around to legislating on a critical issue, the debate has normally moved on already. When the NCAA does try to move fast, like for example after the presidential summit in 2011, the membership, like an organism fighting an infection, pushed back and had many of the biggest reforms either delayed or scaled back. That’s why what appear to the layperson as no-brainers like “any athlete should get to keep any and all scholarships they are awarded for academics or need” languish on the backburner for years, even decades.

That’s clearly evident with the current push for the biggest overhaul of transfer legislation since either the introduction of the graduate transfer waiver or baseball dropping the one-time transfer exception. One part of the plan seems to have solidified around eliminating the permission to contact system and replacing it with a notice of transfer, thus removing the ability of coaches to frustrate or block an athlete’s move to another school.

The other big piece of the transfer puzzle was to expand some form of immediate eligibility to all sports, perhaps with some sort of academic benchmark. Now the Big 12 is pitching a proposal to allow athletes to transfer without sitting out when the head coach is fired or resigned or the program is placed under any sort of postseason ban (not just one which lasts the rest of the student-athlete’s eligibility).

There’s lots of little problems with the Big 12 proposal (pdf), the most notable being that assistant coaches often have as strong or stronger ties to the athletes they recruit, and they aren’t covered by the proposal. But the big problem is that as the Nassar scandal fallout continues, the NCAA membership needs to recognize that the coaches (and other staff) that stay are at least as big of a problem for athletes as the coaches that leave.

When I suggested three things the NCAA could do that would actually help, one of them was to take a hard look at which NCAA rules might have helped enable a predator like Nassar. Nothing in the NCAA Manual sticks out like the transfer legislation. An athlete who is being abused by a coach (abuse that could be sexual, physical, verbal, mental, etc.) often has to get that coach’s permission to transfer and receive an athletic scholarship at the next school. They also have to decide whether to sit out a year or try and also get that coach’s permission to use the one-time transfer exception. There are appeals processes, but at best in these cases they would require the student-athlete to make and defend a serious allegation and at worst are woefully inadequate at protecting student-athletes.

One of the strongest protections the NCAA could provide to student-athletes is to let them walk away from a bad situation, no questions asked. And that means allowing any athlete to transfer without restriction and without penalty.

Would that cause chaos? Maybe. Would it be used for other purposes? Probably. Would is result in the parade of horribles that Pat Forde warns of? Possibly. Does that matter? No.

The NCAA is balancing a number of interests, but those interests don’t have equal weight. I tend to rank the big interests the NCAA is trying to balance like this:

1. Student-athlete health and welfare
2. Academic achievement
3. Competitive equity
4. Ease of administration, coach work/life balance (tie)

If the cons of this proposal are that it would result in lower graduation rates, more tampering, more athletes making impulsive transfer decisions, and mid-major programs being used as farm teams by the power conferences, even all that fails, at least in my opinion, to outweigh the benefit of letting student-athletes escape an abuser without having to point the finger at them before they are ready.