ALTOONA, Pa. -- Get off my lawn!!!! That's right, I'm going to play the role of angry old man here, because what I'm writing about makes me very angry as a lifelong fan of college athletics.
I didn't totally care for the rule change a couple of years ago that allowed college football and basketball players the ability to transfer and play immediately somewhere else. Forcing transfers to sit out a year served as a good deterrent, I always felt, and led to at least some kind of stability with college rosters.
But hey, I get it. Our society has morphed dramatically in recent years to allow more and more and more personal freedoms for everyone. And with regards to college sports, it had begun to seem archaic that a football or basketball player didn't have an opportunity to take a mulligan at a new school without having to sit out a year.
Coaches leave jobs all the time, so why not allow the athletes to leave and start over somewhere else?
I eventually got on board with the NCAA's one-time transfer policy, which has been around now for a couple of years.
But now, thanks to a new rule that's on the horizon, we're about to head into dangerous and slimy waters.
The new rule, recommended by an NCAA council, will allow college athletes who are academically eligible to transfer as many times as they would like, all without penalty of having to sit out a year. There also will be transfer windows, to determine the periods when players can change schools.
We could see athletes transferring four times and playing for five different schools -- one as a freshman, another as a sophomore, another as a junior, another as a senior and then yet another as a grad transfer if he took a redshirt year along the way.
The rule is expected to be passed by the NCAA on Aug. 3.
And that will be that.
We will enter the era of complete and total free agency.
And college athletics will be ruined forever.
When you couple the ability of players to transfer multiple times with the NIL money and abuse of that system that is sure to occur, I can't help but come to one conclusion: We will have complete chaos in college athletics.
If you thought we were already there because NIL and the transfer portal have been around for a couple of years, think again. Give it 10 or 20 years with the double-edged sword in place, and we won't recognize college sports any longer.
Now look, I realize there are some of you out there thinking this: Why shouldn't we just let college athletes transfer as many times as they like? Regular college students have that ability, it's a free country, and so football and basketball players should be able to do it if they so please.
I hear where you're coming from. I do. But I just disagree with that type of thinking altogether when it comes to professional sports.
But wait, aren't we talking about college sports here?
Yes. But not really. Not at all.
Major college football is a professional sport. Major college basketball is a professional sport. Trying to romanticize them the way we used to is dumb, given how much money there is at stake nowadays.
So, you know what NFL players cannot do? You know what NBA players cannot do?
They can't up and change teams every year just because they want to. They have contracts, their rights are owned by teams, and they have to wait a period of time before they can become free agents and seek out another team.
It's ludicrous, in my opinion, that college athletes will be able to jump from team to team to team each year, when that sort of thing has never been allowed in any sport -- professional or collegiate.
Yeah, coaches can leave one school and go to another. But they have to deal with major repercussions, primarily in the name of buyouts, so it's not like there's no deterrent whatsoever.
"A kid can go as many times as he wants and doesn't have to graduate? Wow," Texas A&M coach Jimbo Fisher told CBS Sports this past week. "It's just open recruitment of your own players (by other schools). Everybody can recruit (them). That's what they're doing with third parties anyway, with agents. Agents are coming in saying, 'I can get you a better deal here.'"
Here's where the old man in me comes into play, where I say, "Back in my day ..."
I grew up in the '80s, and while we had free agency in professional sports, you still knew from year to year most of the players who would be on your favorite team. And, of course, you knew all the players on your college team, because there was rarely any turnover.
There's something to be said about being a fan of a team with a stable roster, of getting to know and appreciate the players over several years and develop an even greater rooting interest in them.
I honestly can't stand professional sports in a lot of ways nowadays, and I certainly don't have a favorite team any longer in any pro sport, because what is there really to root for?
The laundry.
The players wearing the laundry change so often that it can be nearly impossible to get to know enough about them to actually want to root for them.
So, we root for the laundry and have to consider many of the players as strangers that we often never get to know.
Hey, if you're OK with that, then fine. You do you when it comes to being a fan, and I'm not here to tell you who or what to root for.
But as time has gone by over the years, and all the players I loved to root for left my teams through free agency, I basically said to hell with it when it comes to pro sports. I'll still watch games to be entertained, but in no way am I passionate about outcomes the way I used to be, when I felt like I had more of a vested interest.
All of this is what eventually will happen to college football. We will see so many players come and go from year to year that we really won't be able to keep close tabs on the roster, or project what teams might be able to accomplish over time.
We will grow to become so desensitized by all of the player movement that, at some point, most or at least many of us will see the passion that we once had for our favorite college teams dwindle and dwindle and dwindle over time.
And as for the players? This entire thing will only further teach them to be even more entitled, and that when the going gets tough, they can just go somewhere else instead of sticking it out and actually working through whatever issues they're having at a certain school.
But hey, we do that in most aspects of our society now. And it's sickening. We coddle everybody, make sure we don't step on anyone's toes, try not to hurt anyone's feelings, and we're all just supposed to be content with the fact that we are fostering an environment of quitters.
Here's what North Carolina coach Mack Brown said last week at ACC media days:
“I don’t like being able to transfer multiple times because it gives that person that’s not willing to step up and fight through some adversity a chance to run. I think the graduation rates of first-time transfers are like 68 percent, and most of the second-time transfers don’t graduate.
"I’m worried about putting more mental pressure on young people. Because it’s easier if you get mad to say I’m leaving, and it takes you five minutes to get in the portal. That’s not good for later, for your family as a father or a husband, or at your job.”
Amen to that.
By allowing college athletes the ability to up and transfer as many times as they want, we're sending the wrong message to these young folks about toughing things out. And we're ruining things for fans, who would like to cheer on their favorite players over their course of their four-year careers, but instead will just have to get used to seeing a whole bunch of them leave every year.
I honestly cannot believe we've gotten to this transfer free-for-all point so quickly, and that the folks in charge of the NCAA could possibly see this as a good idea.
It's a terrible idea, and over time will make it tougher and tougher to be a fan of college sports at all.
