Are coaches using mental health waivers for their own selfish benefit?
No, Mack Brown, shame on you.
Shame on you and your hypocritical coaching colleagues for seemingly exploiting and perhaps even inventing a player’s mental health issues to skirt the NCAA’s multiple transfer rules.
Brown, North Carolina’s football coach, had a well-choreographed temper tantrum recently when the NCAA denied the immediate eligibility waiver of Tar Heels transfer receiver Tez Walker. NCAA rules allow players to transfer once without sitting out a year while they are undergraduates, but since Walker has transferred twice before he needed a waiver to play this season.
After the NCAA turned down Walker’s waiver request, Brown and North Carolina’s administration shamefully went on a PR campaign to sway public opinion against the big, bad NCAA boogeyman. Brown issued a long, fire-and-brimstone statement lambasting the NCAA and stirring up the North Carolina fan base.
“I don’t know that I’ve ever been more disappointed in a person, a group of people, or an institution than I am with the NCAA right now,” Brown fumed in his statement. “It’s clear that the NCAA is about process and it couldn’t care less about the young people [its] supposed to be supporting. Plain and simple, the NCAA has failed Tez and his family and I’ve lost all faith in its ability to lead and govern our sport.
“Just imagine what it is like for Tez to be so excited to come home and have a chance to fulfill his childhood dream of playing for North Carolina in front of all of his family and friends, only to have it taken away despite doing nothing wrong. I can’t begin to understand how this has happened. … Tez should be eligible for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the mental health issues he’s faced during his time in college. … How dare they [NCAA] ever speak about mental health and student-athlete welfare again.”
Brown ended his lengthy diatribe with: “Shame on you, NCAA. SHAME ON YOU!”
Because of Brown’s propagandized pot-stirring, NCAA committee members have endured a vitriolic volcano of vile, profane threats on social media while the national media has predictably piled on the NCAA for being a callous, cruel organization.
Brown, of course, conveniently forgot to include in his statement that he is one of the many college coaches and administrators who lobbied for more “guidelines and guardrails” regarding multiple transfers. In fact, he applauded the NCAA Board of Directors in April after they decided to start cracking down on players who transfer more than once.
Said Brown then: “The other thing they’ve done with the transfer portal, which I think is good, is they’ve said that you can’t transfer twice undergraduate without getting a waiver.”
In other words, Mack Brown likes the NCAA cracking down on multiple transfers as long as they’re not cracking down his multiple transfers.
Don’t get me wrong, I realize it’s easy to criticize the NCAA but can we at least have some intellectual honesty here? The NCAA is not some anonymous, autocratic dictator sitting in an office in Indianapolis making decisions to screw student-athletes. It is made up of committees filled with representatives from member institutions who implement the rules that the majority of them want.
During COVID, the NCAA simply rubber-stamped mental health waivers and allowed players to transfer multiple times with no questions asked. However, in the aftermath of COVID’s transfer free-for-all, more and more college coaches continued to encourage players to transfer multiple times via mental health waivers, and the NCAA started getting absolutely inundated. Consequently, because colleges coaches couldn’t police themselves, they asked the NCAA to crack down.
Certainly, there are many legitimate mental health issues among college athletes, but as the NCAA points out, being immediately eligible to play football isn’t a prerequisite to dealing with those issues. Colleges such as North Carolina can still have these athletes on scholarship, practicing, working out and getting oriented to their new school while addressing their mental health problems.
Said the NCAA in a statement last week: “Citing extenuating factors, such as mental health, does not necessarily support a waiver request but instead may, in some situations, suggest a student-athlete should be primarily focused on addressing those critical issues during the initial transition to a third school.”
Question for Mack Brown: If you didn’t want a more stringent transfer policy then why did you lobby for it in the first place and why did your conference vote for it?
In a statement to ESPN, the NCAA pointed out, “On January 11, the Division I Council — which includes a voting representative from each Division I conference — voted unanimously to significantly tighten the criteria for undergraduate students who transfer for a second time.”
That right, every conference, including the ACC, of which Mack Brown is a member, voted for the NCAA to actually start enforcing a rule that was already on its books. It’s no wonder the NCAA was taken aback by Brown’s hissy fit and issued an almost unprecedented statement a few days ago after its council members started getting threatened by some of the crazy North Carolina fans whom Brown whipped into a frenzy.
University of Georgia President Jere Morehead, the Division I Council chairman, not only released a statement saying the NCAA was “troubled” by Brown’s comments; he called out Brown for being the hypocrite he is.
“[Brown’s] comments directly contradict what we and our fellow Division I members and coaches called for vociferously — including UNC’s own football coach [Mack Brown himself ],” Morehead said in the statement. “We are a membership organization, and rather than pursue a public relations campaign that can contribute to a charged environment for our peers who volunteer on committees, we encourage members to use established and agreed upon procedures to voice concerns and propose and adopt rule or policy changes if they are dissatisfied.”
Translation: Shame on you, Mack Brown.
SHAME ON YOU!