NCAA To End Transfer Waivers
Isaac tried to avoid the no-pads thing last year without success. Future Isaacs won't wonder about immediate eligibility, because the answer will be "nope." [Bryan Fuller]
I must be the only person on earth paying attention to @umichcompliance. This is normally evidence that the rest of you are sane and hearty individuals, but yesterday they posted what looks like relatively big news nobody else has mentioned yet:
Beginning fall 2015, 4-4 undergrad transfers may no longer use a NCAA waiver to be immediately eligible http://t.co/yPrPY4OmzQ
— Michigan Compliance (@umichcompliance) March 17, 2015 You may remember transfer waivers being a big thing during the Ty Isaac transfer saga. It was thought that Michigan might lose out on him since they were not within the 200-mile radius of Isaac's house the NCAA required for a hardship transfer. He decided on Michigan anyway, applied for his waiver, and was denied.
Why make the change? In recent years more and more players had been trying to get transfer waivers for increasingly dubious reasons. It was getting ridiculous, and threatened to create more of an open market for transfers than there was before. (You may think that's a good idea; the NCAA does not.)
Instead the NCAA will offer a one-year extension of the five year clock* in circumstances that warrant it. IE: if you've already redshirted you can make a hardship transfer without losing a year of competition. This wouldn't have affected Isaac but would remove a barrier to other athletes without the incentive of immediate eligibility.
than sticker tuition. It's not even close, your argument is probably the craziest thing I've ever seen posted on Mgoblog. Post-secondary education is a Veblen Good; for the most part, institutions generate more demand by raising prices. Modern non-profit institutions engage in a significent amount of Gold Plating to spend the surpluses/profits they take in. Call it "bloat," administrative waste, whatever.
Athletes, especially in Olympic Sports, do not "require" expensive facilities, and at institutions that don't have lucrative revenue sports tend to have much cheaper facilities and travel. Treating "access to facilities" as compensation is akin to saying that Foxconn employees are compensated by working in a nice factory.
I didn't say that access to facilities was compensation, I said it was a cost to the school. Please read for comprehension.
Besides, as a matter of fact, access to nice facilities is certainly considered compensation of sorts when Google does it. Not taxable compensation, but it's certainly an attraction to working at the company vs. working somewhere else. It's a cost the company takes on because they think it helps them attract more talent, which is not at all unlike a university building those gold-plated locker rooms for athletes.
And limiting your argument to marginal cost of education vs. tuition is absolutely ignorant. Name a single company that ever charges nothing but the marginal cost of production for its product. Show me such a company and I'll show you a dead company. You've heard of fixed costs and capital investment, have you not? Companies - and universities - have to cover them. What you call gold-plating, I call fixed costs and capital investments, and we can argue til we're blue in the face about whether they're necessary, but they exist. Of course the marginal cost of educating one more student is less than tuition - but the actual cost of educating a student is certainly much more, else universities wouldn't rely on donations and public subsidies. As an illustration, if a prof teaches 200 students a year and makes $200,000, then the fixed cost per student is $1,000, a cost which you fail to include in your argument.
has nothing to do with the marginal cost to the Universit of "educating" athletes, and that's the relevant measure to consider when we're trying to ascertain the actual cost to the institution of fielding these teams. Now in some situations, there are institutions that have very tightly fixed class sizes, which means that a student who does not pay for any tuition represents an opportunity cost. But that opportunity cost is the average tuition charged, which in all cases is lower than the sticker price of tuition. That concept does not apply at most D-1 institutions.
What you call gold-plating, I call fixed costs and capital investments
Then you're using the terms "fixed costs and capital investments" wildly incorrectly. Michigan does not need to pay its Olympic Sport coaches 6-figure salaries, build $20 million rowing palaces, etc., and none of those costs is an "investment" since none of those sports stands a chance of generating enough interest/demand to cover those costs.
Being able to transfer without sitting out is definitely better for players, but I would still not support it (despite being for most other pro-player steps)--mostly because I think the potential damage to the quality of the game is too great. I think it would be likely to see large chunks of teams disband when a coach leaves, or to see Alabama get set up as the place you go for your senior year if you were really good your junior year. That could severely damage the quality of the sport, in my opinion.
(I'll also note that, yes, quality of the game is what the NCAA says for half their stupid changes and for avoiding good change, but I think it actually applies here, and is not a terrible or extremely unjust thing for players.)
Agreed. Unlimited ability to transfer and play immediately would (as Space Coyote said above) mainly result in every star player at smaller schools transferring to bigger schools. Then those bigger schools would push someone out to make room. Can't see how this is a good thing. That kind of unlimited freedom is something not even the pros enjoy.
it (in much more melodramatic form) in the early 1970s against MLB free agency. And yet, the host of horribles they *swore* (like literally, in court and before Congress) would occur not only didn't happen, in some ways free agency actually enhanced player stability.
I am not a soothsayer but my guess is that, if the college sports cartel allowed free transfer, the stars at weaker programs would mostly stay put and would not be the biggest risks to transfer. The backups at the power schools would be the biggest risks to transfer, and I think that would probably improve the quality of football and men's basketball.
Is that, for the most part, the coaches are still getting off completely free, only the program that was there to help the coach gets hurt by this.
There are some mitigating factors that a program can do, but if you're winning at CMU and you get offered a head coaching job at UC, more times than not you're going to take it. Why does CMU get hurt because they picked a good coach before others knew he was a good coach?
See Jim McElwain. Or AFC Ajax.
If CMU's AD thinks he has an extraordinary head football coach who is a strong risk to leave for a wealthier program, he can offer that coach a contract with a lot of guaranteed $$ and a much higher buyout. Those contracts shift some/most of the risk of poor future performance from the coach to the AD/institution, but they also shift some of the "risk" of future elite performance (or stated differently "risk of unilateral gain of future elite performance") from the coach to the institution.
The issue becomes getting more coaches to sign contracts like McElwain's was at CSU, but I think you actually brought up a good point. That gives food for thought for changing my opinion on being able to transfer freely when a coach leaves. And actually, I think schools are too quick to fire coaches for the most part (an issue throughout sports); this would give schools another incentive too not fire a guy too hastily, further benefiting the players (assuming if you fire a coach, your players are free to transfer); though I'd be a bit worried in some cases of a mass-exodus.
But it's food for thought.
An AD might misread a coach's ability and end up Ferentz-ing him/herrself (or the sucessor) and being stuck with expensive, long term mediocrity. That's true with long term contracts in everything-pro sports, law firms, Home Depot, whatever. That's one of the reasons the last round of collective bargaining in the NBA was so odd. The owners wanted universal (mostly) short term contracts badly. That's a feature if your GM made a bunch of poor decisions, but it also means that if your GM was a genius or really lucky (e.g. John Hart for the Cleveland Indians in the early 1990s, or Jerry Krause with the Bulls in the late 1980s) you lose a significant amount of value.
March 18th, 2015 at 12:53 PM ^
The courts cannot obliterate this anti-labor cartel fast enough.
March 18th, 2015 at 12:55 PM ^
I suspect it will be a pretty uncommon waiver. It still has to go before a review board as it did with transfer waivers previously.
Coaches will be telling athletes to go redshirt elsewhere before coming to campus to field teams of older players.So coaches will be telling players to enroll at rival schools? I don't think that's ever going to be a likely occurrence.
March 19th, 2015 at 11:14 PM ^
Here you go: http://espn.go.com/college-football/story/_/id/12314026/rob-ash-montana…
I trust you can figure out my response from that.
This strikes me as yet another case of the NCAA making decisions based on what they want to see people do, as opposed to what they should be allowed to do.
I can see why they did it, but I don't even think there should be a waiver, because I think the NCAA controlling transfers is sticking their nose too far in the first place. If a student wants to transfer that should be the end of the discussion from the athletic side. I wouldn't want to see it, but I see a lot of people do things I don't like. But unless they're actually hurting someone I realize I don't have a say in what they do.
Fact of the matter is, there's nothing inherently good or moral about a player, any more than there's anything inherently good or moral about a person, because players are people. Some are good. Some are selfish. Some won't be affected because they feel loyal to their school. Some would happily be football mercenaries. Yeah, those guys will "abuse" the transfer waiver without a second thought. Don't like it? Deal. It's their life. Call me when one of them robs a bank or something. That the NCAA has a say in the first place is, well, very NCAA of them.
one possible positive would be that red-shirted players may still be able to play 4 years if they transfer without a hardship. Donnal in basketball, for example. If he decided to transfer under the former rule, he would have only 2 more years of eligibility. This way he gets 3.
And that is a benefit for players, particularly players that come in raw and redshirt. If ultimately they don't like where they are, the eligibility isn't reduced because they later transfer.
red-shirted players may still be able to play 4 years if they transfer without a hardship.
From above, it sounds like that would only apply if they have a hardship. If a guy is transferring just to get more playing time, he wouldn't get the extra year.
...in all seriousness though, it's not that big of a deal in my eyes.
is this the same rule that allows grad transfers? is that rule affected? i'm not a compliance guy, i honestly have no idea.
immediate-eligibility transfers (grad or undergrad) always strike me as pretty cheesy. one of the reasons i love college sports over the pros is the whole 'rooting for laundry' / mercenary aspect of the pros. i can talk myself into believing (rightly or wrongly) that college players have some primal connection to their schools...these types of transfers tear some of that down for me.
But in short, no. This only impacts undergraduate players.
Most of the arguments fall somewhere along the lines of keeping the sanctity of the game intact, not diluting the quality of the product and such. That's two-thirds of the view, from fan and AD/Coach perspective. Is there a different point of view from a student-athelete? Are there other considerations than simply playing for a better team? If all of the student-athletes wanted to play for the winner, then Alabama should have won all the games in the last five years and NE would have won fifteen super bowls and Lions would have never come out of the 0-16 funk.
Can we assume or argue that even if the student-athletes are allowed to transfer freely, the balance would still be there simply because not everyone will end up at the 'winner'?
Eligibility to play football is not compensation, and restricting that eligibility is not denying compensation. The scholarship and its associated allowances are the compensation, and no one is talking about restricting that with a transfer.
If we really wanted to "level the playing field" between coaches and players, we'd be arguing for eliminating the requirement for players to attend classes, since coaches aren't required to go to classes. Being required to attend classes and do the homework is a far bigger "penalty" than not being eligible to play for a year.
Of course, that is absurd, but so is the whole "punishing the player by not allowing him to play for a year" argument.
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