The Big Ten has proposed a one-time transfer allowance for all student-athletes. It’ll have mixed consequences.
If you stopped watching college football, or college sports in general about ten years ago and decided to pick it back up this past year or two, there’s a good chance you’d be shocked by all the changes. One of the movements that’s changed things drastically is the transfer portal.
It’s now easier to transfer thanks to the ability to simply put your name in the portal rather than going through the red tape of engineering discussions with opposing programs and coaching staffs through your own athletic department. It’s also has become easier to get waivers approved for the NCAA’s undergraduate transfer rule that makes athletes sit out a year.
What has resulted is not exactly free agency in college sports, but something moving closer towards it. Heck, just last year alone, three of the four Heisman finalists were kids that transferred to greener pastures and carved out a better situation for themselves. That, of course, will do nothing to curb some of the transfer of top-end athletes.
It’s been a management nightmare though for coaches, players and administrators. You now have to try and figure out how many scholarships are available, manage to any defections, and even recruit players out of the transfer portal that could make a difference for your program.
What has ensued is not the wild, wild, west exactly, but something closer to a car auction without a garage. All parties involved agree there needs to be better oversight, but nobody has the answers.
But the Big Ten is trying to get in front of it by waving the white flag just a bit. This past week news surfaced about the conference quietly proposing a one-time transfer option for all athletes. It would allow them a one-time exemption to transfer as an undergraduate without having to sit out a year. This according to a report from CBS Sports.
The “year-in-residency” rule has been in place since 1951, but it currently only pertains to five sports — football, baseball, men’s basketball, women’s basketball, and hockey. Now, the Big Ten believes it’s time to make it uniform and make things more transparent and understandable.
We’ll see where this goes, but there are pros and cons that are evident on the surface. While instituting a one-time transfer would take away the ambiguity of when and who can get an exception to the one-year in residency rule, it would further open the flood gates for kids to transfer. Given the opportunity to move on instead of develop and stick things out, many might pull the rip-chord early and miss out on a better situation in front of them.
There will be two schools of thought. Many will push the benefits of sticking with something, working through adversity and coming out the better end with a life lesson. There will be another — and perhaps more vocal — side of the argument that will praise the advocate for the individual’s freedom of choice. Yes, there will be Twitter fights.
Anyway, there’s going to more come out on this. Other conferences, and the NCAA itself, will need to study and weigh in on this proposal. The earliest the Big Ten could adopt the rule would be in 2021, so there’s at least a little bit of time, though that’ll be here before you know it.
Whatever happens, between the name, image, and likeness stuff and this, big-time college athletics continues to evolve.
