NCAA transfer portal is fair, just — and completely out of control | Opinion
Now we get the game wanted by everybody and nobody, with results we can see right away and repercussions that won’t be felt for years. This one particular game, tell me: Is it good for college basketball? Is it bad? Do you honestly think we’re talking about Duke vs. North Carolina in the Final Four?
No. This is bigger than Duke-UNC.
This is the transfer portal.
And it is a game, or another level to the game that is college basketball. Big part of college football, too, but this game is so huge and terrifying, let’s narrow the focus to college basketball after mentioning that more than 3,000 college football players entered the transfer portal after last season. Do the math: Eighty-five scholarships per team, 124 FBS schools. That’s about 10,000 college football players. Nearly 30% entered the transfer portal.
It’s just too much, so let’s stick with college basketball and the chaos happening right here, right now.
The numbers are rising as we speak. Go to the website verbalcommits.com and watch its updating tracker. It’s mesmerizing. When I began writing this story at 9:31 a.m., there were 958 names in the portal. At 10:24 a.m., there were 962 names.
STAY UP-TO-DATE: Subscribe to our Sports newsletter now!
Without a final number to work with yet, let’s go back one year, to 2020-21: More than 1,700 Division I college basketball players entered the transfer portal. More math: Thirteen scholarships per team, 353 Division I schools. That’s 4,600 college basketball players.
Nearly 37% entered the transfer portal.
It’s just too much.
Isn’t it?
What we did right there, that’s called setting up the story. Well, it’s what I called it. Because this topic is too big to jump into carelessly.
You know, like the NCAA did when it allowed the transfer portal in the first place.
The transfer portal was the most NCAA move ever, and by that I mean, it was a move made too late, too negligently, and only out of fear. The NCAA is located in Downtown Indianapolis, and I’m friendly with a lot of those folks, but they’re overmatched and they know it.
The business of college sports has grown so large, so fast, with TV money and (legalized) gambling money and $10 million coaches and impatiently petulant boosters, the NCAA is just trying to hang on. College sports is a bucking bull, bouncing violently all over the place while the NCAA – the office in Indianapolis – hangs on for dear life.
Remember the Independent Accountability Resolution Process, the NCAA’s way of allowing independent oversight on its most complicated enforcement cases? A game-changer, we were told. It was done because the NCAA is scared of coming down too hard on its biggest schools – Arizona, Auburn, Southern California, etc. – and leading the so-called Power Five conferences to break away someday from the mean ol’ NCAA and keep all that TV money for itself.
Which would put many of those people in the NCAA offices out of work.
The IARP was supposed to streamline the process, and the FBI has even done the heavy lifting, identifying cheating within some of the NCAA’s biggest programs – Arizona, Auburn, Southern California – that rose to the level of criminal charges. Coaches at those schools were literally arrested. That was September 2017. Nearly five years ago.
What has the NCAA done? Almost nothing. Arizona finally fired Sean Miller last April and LSU finally fired Will Wade two weeks ago, because oh my God how do you not fire Sean Miller and Will Wade?
Miller was out of work 11 months. He was hired Saturday at Xavier. The NCAA has ruled on just one FBI-related case, tapping North Carolina State lightly on its naughty little hand.
It's been five years.
So anyway, the transfer portal. Forever, the NCAA took the hardline stance that players cannot transfer without having to sit out a year, oftentimes sacrificing a year of eligibility if they redshirted for any other reason; the five-year clock waits for nobody. That transfer policy, especially with weasel coaches like Brian Kelly leaving one school for another literally before its season has ended – and getting an enormous raise in the process! – was brutally unfair.
The public outcry got to be so large, and the NCAA so scared, that it threw up its hands – the hell with it – and gave every player in America the freedom to transfer one time, free of charge. The NCAA created the transfer portal.
Coaches screwed it up, immediately. The media helped.
Kids entering the transfer portal? That’s their business. Some of them won’t end up transferring, and unless they announce it themselves, they don’t need the public – fans, media – knowing their business.
Well, coaches got around that by giving their log-in information – literally, their access to the transfer portal, usernames and passwords, all of it – to a handful of reporters who logged in daily and outed those kids. I happen to know some of those reporters. Consider them friends. But that was … that was awful.
The NCAA now tracks IP addresses to catch coaches for that particular breach of ethics, just another unseen consequence of a rule that was written so large, so fast.
Is the rule so wrong? Listen, I don’t know. Being a parent changes your worldview. My kids are out of college, and they weren’t athletes, but I see these college athletes and think: Mine were that age. What would I want for them? I’d want them to have the freedom to correct a mistake, or to give another situation a chance, without having to sacrifice a year of their athletic life.
So, this is good. Kids like all of those at Indiana (Rob Phinisee, Khristian Lander, Parker Stewart, Michael Durr) and Isaiah Thompson at Purdue and Bryce Golden at Butler, they should be able to see what’s out there. Lander in particular was ruined, or at least set way back, by Archie Miller when the former Indiana coach was flailing, sinking, desperate to land a five-star recruit to save his job. So he talked Lander into reclassifying, graduating a year early, and landed him before anyone knew what had happened.
Archie Miller gambled a kid’s future to save his own.
You can have the Miller brothers.
And you can be conflicted, right? You can say Phinisee, Golden and Co. have the right to look around, along with six players from Binghamton, five from New Hampshire, four named "Butler" and three starters on the Kentucky women’s team – it's 10:46 a.m., and the number in the transfer portal is up to 965 – and I still say this feels like too much.
Now you ask: What’s the solution, Goldilocks?
I don’t know! The previous porridge, the NCAA’s heartless transfer policy, was too cold. But this porridge is scalding, with college coaches cheating by contacting players at other schools, players who haven’t entered the transfer portal, to let them know a scholarship awaits if they want one.
That was reported by ESPN’s Dick Vitale, who knows a coach or two, but also: You know it’s happening. You just do. The way some coaches break rules – as large as criminal charges, as "small" as sharing their log-in credentials with reporters – you know some of them are reaching out to kids at other schools.
You know it.
Solution? Let’s start here: Any team with a staff change at any level, for any reason – head coach or assistant, fired or just gone to another job – should let its players transfer without penalty. Any team facing NCAA sanctions should do the same. Those are obvious. Those are fair.
What else is obvious, what else is fair? Maybe the transfer portal, as it stands, is obviously fair. And it probably is, to be honest. Speaking as a dad, as a human being with a beating heart, the transfer portal feels like the right thing.
So why does the whole thing feel wrong? And why, at 11:30 a.m., is the number in the transfer portal up to 969?
Follow IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at @GreggDoyelStar or at www.facebook.com/greggdoyelstar.