NCAA also changes rules for redshirts
Oct. 15, to transfer to a different school and receive a scholarship once there without asking for a release from their current school, effectively making cases like Johnson’s a draconian relic.
“They should name it the Cam Rule,” Gil Johnson said Wednesday. “After all, he went through, he deserves it.”
It was one of two measures passed this week by the NCAA that slightly shifts the balance of power between athletes and coaches/administrators.
In another piece of legislation, the council ruled Division I football players can participate in up to four games in a season without using a redshirt and losing a season of competition.
As it relates to transfers, players choosing to leave merely have to notify their current school of their intentions and, within two business days, the school has to enter that athlete’s name into a national database. Once an athlete’s name is in the database, other coaches are allowed to contact them.
The NCAA’s new model eliminates a step in the process that has come under increased scrutiny in recent years. Previously, athletes would have to get permission from their current school to contact another school, therefore allowing their current school to forbid that player from going to certain universities, if they so choose. It was a rule originally enacted to discourage coaches from actively recruiting athletes from other schools, but it too often put an athlete’s future in the hands of a coach or administrator with arbitrary motives.
Johnson’s case — in which Pitt, citing a university policy, wouldn’t allow him to transfer within the conference — was far from an abnormality.
Last year, Kansas State football coach Bill Snyder prohibited a wide receiver from transferring to 35 schools. Alabama football coach Nick Saban has taken criticism during the past two years for not allowing players to transfer within the SEC.
Locally, Sheldon Jeter, a former Beaver Falls High School standout, was blocked from transferring from Vanderbilt to Pitt. Instead, Jeter spent a year at a Florida junior college. By his senior season, he was reunited with Kevin Stallings, his former coach at Vanderbilt who wouldn’t allow him to go to Pitt.
“There’s obviously a small few cases that people have highlighted, at times, where people didn’t receive their permission to contact. But it was also a safeguard to maybe keep coaches honest and not be tampering and make sure that there was just some protocol to the whole thing,” said Robert Morris coach Andy Toole, who told Sports Illustrated last year that coaches from other schools sent mail to his office to be given Rodney Pryor if he was released from his scholarship.
Pryor joined Georgetown in 2016-17.
New Pitt basketball coach Jeff Capel was unavailable Wednesday. Duquesne coach Keith Dambrot, however, described the rule as “a partial fix.”
Even with the passage of the transfer proposal, the NCAA noted that individual conferences still can make transfer rules that are more restrictive than the national rule. The Big East, for example, doesn’t allow men’s and women’s basketball players to transfer within the conference.
The measure, while incremental, represents progress.
“Most people don’t understand how much time we spend developing guys, but they still have the absolute right to leave,” Dambrot said. “They should be able to go anywhere they want to go just like we [coaches] have the right to go anywhere we want to go.”
In football, the organization’s decision regarding player participation could prove to be just as important.
Football coaches have long been accustomed to redshirting, often as a way to allow freshmen to acclimate to the physical rigors of college football without losing a year of eligibility. Barring rare exceptions, Division I athletes have a five-year window to complete four seasons of competition.
Players originally scheduled to redshirt, however, frequently lost that year of eligibility after injuries to players ahead of them or any number of factors thrust them into action for only a handful of games or plays. Previously, athletes could only play in three games and preserve that season of eligibility if they hadgotten injured.