As he stood there last week, his feet firmly planted on the lush emerald meadow of the TCU football practice field, Coach Sunshine couldn’t have been happier.
The weather was warm. The quarterbacks were looking good. Six days of spring workouts were completed, and no essential personnel had left with a limp . . . yet.
“You need to get this,” coach Gary Patterson said, gesturing to the new turf Bermuda, so green that it appeared, well, artificial.
He was in a rare mood, indeed. But then our old friend Drew Davison brought up a sore subject, and Hurricane Patterson suddenly blew in.
Transfer portal! As far as Patterson is concerned, those are two four-letter words.
Drew had simply asked for Patterson’s reaction to the NCAA’s decision to grant transfer quarterback Tate Martell a waiver that will make him immediately eligible at Miami.
“Better be careful or we won’t have college football,” Patterson said. “It’s disappointing, to be honest with you. I don’t care what they say.”
His feelings about the transfer rule are nothing new. Patterson railed against the rule’s impracticality and the problems it was causing as far back as last September.
But a developing loophole is being exploited. The NCAA is rubber-stamping requests from a growing percentage of transfers who don’t want to sit out the required year.
No, I don’t have the data for that. On the NCAA’s own website, in fact, you’ll find a chart and a video from a committee member that purport the percentage of waivers requested and granted since 2014-15 hasn’t changed much.
But let’s have a recount after the depth charts are published following spring practice, shall we?
A study by the Associated Press last month showed that the NCAA has granted immediate eligibility waivers to 51 of the 63 requesting student-athletes. That number is at least 52 of 64 after the Martell decision.
Among the guidelines for granting waivers is one that reads, “The transfer is due to documented mitigating circumstances that are outside the student-athlete’s control and directly impact the health, safety and well-being of the student-athlete.”
“Health, safety and well-being” apparently now include your current team demoting you on its depth chart. That’s what happened at Georgia, where freshman quarterback Justin Fields transferred to Ohio State, prompting Martell’s ensuing exodus to Miami.
These aren’t graduate transfers, a route that several athletes, degrees in hand, have followed to often-greener pastures. Patterson has two on his own roster in Mike Collins and Alex Delton (Kansas State).
What Patterson and a growing Greek chorus of other Division I football coaches fear is that players will seek the NCAA transfer portal as a path of least resistance, especially if it doesn’t entail a one-year wait.
In all cases, it appears the transferring players who were seeking immediate relief simply lawyered up. Tom Mars, a former Hillary Clinton law partner in Little Rock, found enough “mitigating circumstances” to make former Ole Miss quarterback Shea Patterson immediately eligible at Michigan.
Gary Patterson (no relation) believes that young people need to be taught the value of a commitment.
“So when you sign a lease on an apartment and you don’t like it, they’ll just let you out, and you can just walk away and it doesn’t cost you anything?” Patterson asked. “You don’t get to do that in life.”
Instead of handing out waivers as if they were juice boxes and pats on the head, Patterson would like to see a transfer provision that he says has been on the table from the beginning:
“You want a change, you sit out. And if you graduate, you get your year back.”
But that, of course, makes too much sense for the NCAA.
“To be honest with you, I want the names of all those people who are doing this, so everybody knows their names when they ruin the game,” he said.
“I don’t care if there’s a lawyer involved, the bottom line is we need to do what’s best for the game.”
The eligibility waivers are going to open a can of worms, someone suggested to Hurricane Patterson.
“Oh, it’s opened,” Patterson assured.
A large share of his argument was rooted in a mantra he truly believes.
“I want to protect the game,” he said, “so that we can still put kids through a process and they can learn – learn that it’s not just about football, it’s about growing up and how you can handle life and handle the hard times.”
Hard times, even like being moved down to second string.
“Let me ask you a question,” said another coach. “If we make a rule that guys can transfer whenever they want to, how are we supposed to get people to do what they should do? I’m not talking about as football players. I’m talking about as people — making good choices and decisions off the field.
“So if a guy is missing classes and I say, ‘You’re not going to be playing this game because you’re missing classes’ – which I’ve done on occasion – and he just says, ‘Well, I’m done. I’m transferring,’ is that good?”
The coach who said that is Nick Saban.
The easy retort, of course, is that coaches are free to change jobs without sitting out a season. Most, if not all, however, have buyout clauses that compensate the school from which the coach departs.
Coaches are also adults. How does an 18- or 19-year old kid maturely weigh such a life-altering decision as transferring?
The answer is that he often doesn’t. There’s a family member or, heaven forbid, an agent making the decision for him.
The NCAA has announced that, amidst the building drumbeat from football coaches, it will review the recently enacted transfer procedures and perhaps reconsider. Patterson said he intends to make his voice heard.
But here’s another problem: The person representing the NCAA group that makes the waiver decisions – the Committee for Legislative Relief – was an associate athletic director from Lafayette College, enrollment 2,610.
Others on the seven-member committee included representatives from UTEP, James Madison, Monmouth, Florida Gulf Coast and the Atlantic Sun Conference.
(Pause here to let the Division I football coaches scream.)
The only thing most of this committee knows about big-time college football is what they’ve learned in a Larry Culpepper TV commercial.
If their obliviousness persists and they open the gates to a feared “free agency” in college football, it could be the final push towards autonomy – a complete break from the NCAA for big-time football schools.
Will your school be invited to that party? Don’t be presumptuous.
By banding together as a group, the football universities could make their own recruiting rules, set (or abolish) their own transfer rules, dole out their own monthly payments for players and seek their own mega-lucrative TV contract.
Schools could still belong to the NCAA for everything else, but football would run itself.
Now that’s a hurricane. I think the TCU head coach would be all for it.
