This week’s college football podcast takes a look at potential new restrictions to the NCAA’s graduate transfer rule as well as John and Zach’s bucket list stadiums to visit.
The NCAA never disappoints. At least in terms of being remarkably tone-deaf and providing podcast fodder for John and Zach to rail against.
Billy Witz penned a piece for the New York Times last week that discussed the possibility that the window could be closing on the wave of graduate transfers across college athletics since the rule was tweaked in 2011.
In essence, the rule change would dock a scholarship to a program that accepted a graduate transfer if that student athlete didn’t complete his degree within one year (or two for the cases of grad transfers who have more than one year of remaining eligibility.)
This would apply to football and men’s and women’s basketball. The potential rule change wouldn’t hurt as much in football where programs are given 85 scholarships to play with, but could severely limit the ability for transfer in basketball with teams only holding 13 scholarships. Losing even one could be devastating.
It’s another instance of the NCAA trying to take away any power or leverage the student-athlete may have. We have plenty more to say about that on this week’s podcast.
In our goal of bringing a soul-bearing kind of topic every week, we also made an attempt at giving our top five bucket list college football stadiums that we would each like to visit. We ended up talking about more than that, as we both are suckers for the historical aspect of the sport.
The aesthetic of some of college football’s grandest and oldest venues is hard to top, and can go a long way in providing formative experiences for fans of the sport.
As always, we’d love to hear from you. What are your thoughts on the proposed graduate transfer rule changes? What college football venues would be on your bucket list?
The Saturday Blitz Podcast is part of the FanSided Radio Network on Spreaker. The show goes live every Wednesday morning. You can reach John Mitchell @jlmitchell93 and Zach Bigalke @zbigalke on Twitter.