NCAA Transfer Portal highlights need for overhaul in college football transfer rules

The offseason, with help from the Transfer Portal, exposed the hypocrisy of the restrictions placed on college football athletes. It’s time for the NCAA to rewrite the transfer rules.

The 2019 college football offseason is notable for the introduction of the Transfer Portal, a means for players to declare their intent to transfer to a new school to play intercollegiate football. Ostensibly, the system gives increased power to players because they can add their name to the list of transfer options. Coaches then have the freedom to contact and recruit these transfers to come to their institutions.

It all sounds good on paper. But the inverse of this ostensible freedom is that, if a player is not able to land a new scholarship, their original school is under no obligation to take them back. Players are forced to gamble on their own future when the system insulates itself from adversity.

The macabre joke peddled by the NCAA and its member institutions is that student-athletes are first and foremost students… held to a different standard than any other student on campus, even those who are on full scholarships of various types.

College football is especially egregious in placing all the risk on the player while handing all the reward to the adults on the sidelines pulling the levers of power. Coaches are granted freedom of movement, freedom to negotiate their contracts, and the freedom to get paid for their labor.

By and large, the one thing that is theoretically offered to student-athletes — the opportunity to study for the cost of attendance at the academic institution affiliated with the team in exchange for on-field labor — is held as a one-way bargaining chip that can be revoked at any point.

The myth of four-year full ride scholarships is that they pave the way for a good football player to earn a free trip through undergraduate studies.

That’s all it really is though, a myth.

Often the full cost of attendance comes with a gap between the value of the scholarship and what it actually costs to go to school, forcing these athletes to take out loans to cover the difference. And those four-year scholarships are more often than not really just a series of one-year scholarships that are renewed annually at the coach’s discretion.

Student-athletes are not afforded the opportunity to transfer to a school that might offer a better scholarship offer that eliminates the need to take out loans. They are unable to shop around after the fact for a program that might offer a four- or five-year scholarship (and even one that might guarantee that scholarship in the case of injury) that cannot be revoked by a coach.

These are all things that any other student sitting in the same survey-course lecture halls as a freshman on Tuesday mornings is allowed to do at any point of their collegiate experience. Athletes, in the guise of forcing them to honor a commitment that is explicitly designed as fealty instead of mutual loyalty, are not given free transfer rights that are even afforded to those coaches who preach loyalty while showing so little of their own.

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When a player does decide to transfer, they are required to sacrifice a year of eligibility as penance for daring to switch schools. This has stirred up a robust market in petitioning the NCAA for waivers to grant immediate eligibility. Justin Fields is the prime case this offseason, as the former Georgia quarterback hopes to step in immediately at Ohio State after leaving Athens.

In those instances where a petition does not pan out and they are forced to sit on the sidelines, athletes are still forced to work with the program and are not allowed to earn outside money that could mitigate the need for further loans down the road. There is always a catch no matter how the coin flip turns out for the player.

When it comes to rules that are designed to give students greater mobility, such as the graduate transfer rule, even these are fraught with loopholes. They theoretically reward an athlete who has finished undergraduate studies to transfer to a new program for graduate studies without losing a year of eligibility. But this rule can be gamed by the coaches.

The big story this offseason has been the new destinations for several top-tier graduate transfers. One, Jalen Hurts, went from losing his starting job at Alabama to taking over the quarterback spot at Oklahoma that was previously held by the past two Heisman winners. Just a few years later, the tables turned when Oklahoma sought to take the same pettily vindictive stance against Austin Kendall.

Lincoln Riley brought in Jalen Hurts to serve as the presumptive new starter in Norman, showing a lack of confidence in a quarterback he himself recruited to the Sooners while still serving as the offensive coordinator under Bob Stoops. But he had enough confidence in that quarterback to fear his transfer to Morgantown to play for West Virginia.

It is time for the NCAA to step in and provide some measure of rights to student-athletes that are currently lacking in the transfer process.

Intercollegiate athletes get too little time to actually play on this stage to be dealt spiteful punishments for making the same decisions they see coaches, those “molders of men” they pattern themselves out to be, make all the time on the basis of pure self-interest.

The organization should provide immediate relief for student athletes that allows four things to happen:

1. Players need to be afforded full right of free agency. Unless a school has contractually guaranteed a four-year scholarship or a five-year scholarship to a student-athlete, that player should not be held to what effectively amounts to a reserve clause that can only be broken by sacrificing eligibility for the right of movement. If we are going to value education and say that these athletes should be appreciative of the allowance to go to school, we cannot force appreciation and loyalty through coercion.
2. Players need to be able to negotiate for such contractual rights and guarantees of scholarships and other remuneration. We should be allowing those athletes to negotiate deals for which they actually have a reason to be appreciative. When that scholarship is hardly a guarantee and the workload often limits the opportunities available to athletes in their time as students, it is ignorant to demand appreciation for its own sake. They should also have the right to unionize and collectively bargain under the Northwestern precedent.
3. Even when a player does negotiate for these guarantees, a full season of eligibility should not be the punishment for breaking that contract. Coaches have their contracts bought out by their new schools, and because the NCAA maintains the illusion of amateurism they cannot demand money for player transfers. A full year is money down the drain for every player whose “full-ride” scholarship is anything but full cost-of-attendance coverage. At most one game should be the limit on how much time a player can be forced to sit out.
4. The NCAA should immediately prevent conferences under the organization’s auspices to add additional punitive clauses that prevent immediate eligibility for players to transfer within conferences, to play for former coaches, or any other reason. Especially in an era when coaches can and do jump ship at will for better opportunities, and when conferences are becoming more geographically stretched than ever, there should be no artificial barrier to transferring between any two FBS programs.

This would provide for the first time a modicum of real control for college players over their own situations. As something they have never really enjoyed before, that level of agency could allow the system to radically alter to reward and provide for the individuals who put in the physical effort for the wealth of entertainment provided by a program.

It is a courtesy extended to every coach in the country. And for players whose professional opportunities are always going to be limited by the closed market of the NFL, and whose options could be further limited by an injury at any time, it is a courtesy that needs to be extended by NCAA mandate to every student-athlete as well.

Now is the time for the NCAA to act and allow athletes to enjoy full autonomy of movement and negotiation rights they theoretically are supposed to protect from a system designed to strip them of their agency. It is the least they can provide for a system that profits so much on the surplus value of their labor.