NCAA transfer rules place draconian restrictions on athlete movement. A group of players could clearly expose the hypocrisy by forming an FCS superteam.
As we get deeper into the bowl season, big names continue to pop up as potential transfers to new schools. Among just the participants in the College Football Playoff, three of the four teams are likely going to see their starter at the beginning of the year plying his trade at a new program in 2019.
Alabama could see Jalen Hurts go to a new program after watching Tua Tagovailoa supplant him as the starter in Tuscaloosa. Notre Dame’s Brandon Wimbush also lost his job this year and could be on his way out of South Bend. And Kelly Bryant left the Clemson program to preserve his eligibility as soon as Trevor Lawrence took over as the full-time starter for the Tigers.
Each of those three players would be able to start immediately at whatever location they opt to transfer. That is not the case, however, for every high-profile name possibly moving to another school.
One in particular whose name has received plenty of notice is young Georgia quarterback Justin Fields. The true freshman from Kennesaw, Georgia originally opted to come to Athens instead of playing at Florida, Florida State or Texas A&M. After a year spent mostly sitting behind entrenched incumbent Jake Fromm, though, Fields is assessing his options as he considers a transfer.
For Fields, though, the question of whether he would be able to play immediately is up in the air. Normally, when an undergraduate football player transfers between FBS schools, he is required to sit out a year. Fields would ostensibly be no exception.
There has been speculation that Fields will apply to the NCAA for a waiver to play immediately after he was the target of racial epithets during his time between the hedges. But even if Fields gets the opportunity to transfer and play immediately, the policy remains a case-by-case basis that limits the mobility of a student-athlete contingent on meeting arbitrary and ever-shifting standards of exemption.
But there is an avenue to play immediately without exception.
While transferring between FBS schools puts athletes at the behest of the NCAA’s whims, there is a path available that definitively offers a chance to play immediately for any student regardless of whether they have completed their undergraduate degrees. That path affords the opportunity to keep playing Division I football without requesting an exemption.
After the split of Division I into I-A (FBS) and I-AA (FCS) subdivisions in 1978, it opened up a transfer loophole that allows students to go from I-A to I-AA programs without incurring the one-year transfer penalty.
For instance, Fields could opt to transfer from Georgia to Kennesaw State in his hometown and take the field immediately without hiring high-powered attorneys and being forced to make a case to the NCAA.
We have seen players take this avenue in the past. Perhaps the most instructive case is that of Randy Moss. Before he evolved into one of the most prolific wide receivers in NFL history, Moss was a high school phenom in West Virginia. Originally signing a letter of intent to play at Notre Dame, Moss was subsequently involved in a fight defending a friend that led to misdemeanor battery charges. As a result, Notre Dame chose to deny Moss enrollment.
After subsequently transferring to Florida State, Moss was forced to sit out a redshirt year as an ostensible transfer student — even though he never suited up for Notre Dame and it was the school that denied him enrollment. Moss sat out a year, then was bounced from the program after testing positive for cannabis use.
Instead of sitting out another year as a transfer student, Moss transferred closer to home to play for Marshall. At the time, the Thundering Herd were still a I-AA powerhouse that had won the 1992 NCAA Division I national championship and played for the title in 1993 and 1995. With Moss in the fold, Marshall was more dynamic than ever.
On the way to a 15-0 season and the school’s second national championship in their final year before transitioning to the I-A ranks, Moss scored more than a quarter of Marshall’s points in 1996 as he tied Jerry Rice’s I-AA record for receiving scores. The Thundering Herd beat opponents by an average of 44-14, and won every game by at least two touchdowns.
The path Moss took to the NFL was circuitous, and it reflects the draconian realities of the NCAA transfer policy. Whatever you think about misdemeanor charges and parole violations, the fact that Notre Dame could unilaterally revoke their contract with Moss without penalty (while the athlete was held liable for being forced to find a new school) is untenable.
How creating an FCS superteam would force changes in transfer policy
Other individual athletes have moved down a division to keep playing football. Most frequently, though, we see young athletes going dropping to the junior college ranks for a few years before returning to the FBS ranks with a new team. This is the path taken most successfully by 2010 Heisman Trophy winner Cam Newton, and it is a wrinkle in the system that has become so prevalent as to invite an entire Netflix series about the phenomenon and a separate set of recruiting rankings for junior-college transfers.
This approach certainly works, but it does nothing to address the broader problems inherent in a system that allows the people who profit from the sport to transfer freely while limiting the freedom of movement of the actual labor on the field. All it would take, though, is a group of young top-shelf FBS recruits to band together and transfer en masse to a single FCS school. Exercising the loophole of immediate eligibility in such a collective fashion would force pressure on the NCAA from the Power Five conferences to rethink penalties.
The idea of a superteam is one that is most prevalent in NBA basketball. It is a fairly straightforward concept, several superstars banding together and exercising their right to freedom of movement as free agents to join forces on one team to form an instant powerhouse. We do not see it as often in football, given the larger size of rosters.
How could a group of high-profile college football players go about creating a superteam at the FCS level? It would require a coordinated effort by a group of freshman and sophomore athletes on both offense and defense to choose an FCS program that meets several key criteria:
- The program must have a coaching staff with a recent history of reaching the FCS playoffs. Key to convincing enough FBS underclassmen to transfer down a subdivision is the understanding that they will receive quality coaching that provides an opportunity to potentially pursue professional careers.
- The program must be losing a lot of senior talent from the previous season. Given the reduced number of scholarships available to FCS programs, a program would need to have the maximum number of scholarships open to give out to as many players as possible. And these would likely need to be full scholarships available to convince each player to move down.
- The program also needs to have a top-tier FBS program on the schedule in each of the next few years. Knowing that they would get several chances to test their mettle as a group against a Power Five school would make the transition downward more attractive to undertake.
This would ostensibly prove most valuable and impactful as a multiyear effort, as the program builds on the reputation of its first group of transfers to court a second and third group that further reinforces the superteam.
What would this look like in practice?
The specific school is less important than meeting the basic criteria. For the sake of this part of the thought experiment, though, let’s imagine this being executed at a school like Youngstown State. The Penguins, led by former Power Five head coach Bo Pelini, reached the FCS championship game as recently as a few years ago. They have the staff to provide strong enough coaching to draw in disaffected FBS underclassmen and a pedigree of producing strong players, such as 2017 NFL Draft picks Derek Rivers and Avery Moss.
Looking just at the first year of the process, there are several must-have positions to fill out. First and foremost, you would need a star quarterback like Fields to serve as the lodestone helping pull in the other players. The quarterback would need at least one top receiving prospect to join him, probably hailing from a powerhouse where the receiver is buried behind veterans on the depth chart. Two would be preferable.
Plucking a running back and a couple of key offensive linemen from similar situations would also be valuable. Possible as well is that they might choose to leave a school where the coaches that recruited them are fired and they do not fit in with the new coach’s scheme. That could prove especially valuable in snatching away linemen on both sides of the ball.
On defense, getting an edge rusher and a stud tackle would offer the ability to immediately fortify an FCS defensive line. A linebacker or two, a safety, and a cornerback or two would also be valuable additions.
In general, the school serving as the testing ground for exercising player agency would need to snag about a dozen players who were at least high-three-star players. At least a couple four-star players must also be in that mix. The split would need to be about even between offense and defense, as the program strengthens the depth chart on both sides of the ball. Setting up an instant front-runner for the FCS title is the goal, so getting players that can dramatically increase the skill level throughout the roster is essential.
Why Power Five programs would argue for more lenient transfer policy
Were such a plan to be executed, the biggest question in that instance is not if FBS schools would appeal to the NCAA to alter the transfer rules, but how quickly they would demand the organization to change the policy. Nominally in question is how they would ask to change the policy. Theoretically, the FBS programs hoping to effect change in the NCAA transfer rules would have two options for which they could advocate.
With the student-athletes exploiting an option that provides them more agency over their movement, the Power Five schools that would lead the effort could lobby for stricter policies that force the same restrictions when moving down a division as they do when transferring between programs at the same level. In this direction, athletes transitioning down from the FBS to the FCS would suddenly be forced to sit out a year after their transfer if they did not yet have their undergraduate degree in hand.
Such a policy, though, would fly in the face of a long-established precedent and would definitely get challenged in court. That, of course, is the last thing that Power Five programs want. The impetus for introducing a guaranteed access point for Group of Five schools in the College Football Playoff system was a desire to forestall the accusations about cartelization that were commonplace during the BCS era. By providing that automatic entry into the New Year’s Six on an annual basis, the idea was to prevent Congress or the courts getting involved in the process.
The same reasoning would go into their wanting to prevent a group of players from taking them to court. The players would have already exposed the myth that an undergraduate degree must be a prerequisite to justify allowing a player to get on the field immediately after transferring to a new school. Building on the 2014 National Labor Relations Board ruling favoring Northwestern football players and their right to unionize, any attempt to close this freedom-of-movement loophole would become an incredible test case that would threaten the entire house of cards.
The other option, then, would be to argue for a transfer policy that mirrors the allowance for moving down to the FCS within Division I. Power Five programs, after it was already exposed that they lacked complete agency over the high schoolers and underclassmen that are the lifeblood of the system, would do whatever it takes to prevent this from becoming a wider trend.
When a loophole of this nature becomes a danger to the status quo, it must either be eliminated or it must be turned into the new status quo. Given the risks associated with attempting to eliminate it, then, expanding the loophole to become the general policy is the easier solution. Once the lid is off Pandora’s box, after all, it is always impossible to close it back up as it was before.
What it would take to make this actually transpire
The probability of players banding together to make such a collective move is certainly not high. But we have seen large groups of players make collective decisions to flood schools with talent in the past. The unity exhibited by the high concentration of talent in South Florida, for instance, was the catalyst for Miami’s rise in the early 1980s under Howard Schnellenberger. Back then, the Hurricanes were hardly a top-tier program.
Their rapid climb into the upper echelons of the college football hierarchy shows that building superteams is possible. It requires a charismatic coach to sell the individuals, the collective will shown by Northwestern a few years ago, and a chip on each player’s shoulder that demands an opportunity to win a national championship at whatever level possible.
The risk of losing exposure for NFL scouts, in this case, would also be mitigated by the instant 24/7 news story this would become for networks like ESPN and FOX Sports. Whichever team managed to land the flood of talent would almost certainly see an increase in nationally-televised showcases. The team would be followed all season long on their quest to become the new kings of the FCS.
It would require a sacrifice, however, that is a lot to ask of young men in their late teens and early 20s. The group that took the risk, though, would go down as legends who dramatically altered the college football landscape.
The FCS coach that exploits this loophole to the maximum would become an instant legend as well, helping expose the hypocrisy of the transfer policy to its fullest. If and when this ever does transpire, it will lead to rapid changes that restore more power to the players who actually entertain us from week to week.