NIL, Transfer Rules Are Pushing Changes That Are Getting Hard To Keep Up With

Not least of all for the NCAA

If you look at world history, revolutions are almost always followed by counter-revolutions, which tend to jerk things back towards the more familiar.

As the dual shocks to the system of NIL and instant transfer continue to reverberate around the NCAA, a lot of people are itching for a counter-revolution of their own.

Liberal transfer rules have completely shaken things up and are driving a lot of coaches crazy. The NCAA supposedly clamped down on it, and now a second immediate transfer is allowed for ‘mental health, exigent circumstances outside the student’s control (such as “physical or sexual assault or discrimination based on a protected class’) or assertions involving diagnosed education-impacting disabilities.”

And as this article shows, the race is on to find loopholes.

More critically, there are a very limited number of professional opportunities in basketball and very few people will be well paid. As they move from school to school, players are falling behind academically. This is a really provocative article. The Athletic is a subscription site but we found a way to read it so we linked it.

This article points out the law of unintended consequences: as schools began to compete more fiercely for NIL money, some are using their fundraising foundations to form collectives to get that sweet, sweet cash to keep men’s football and basketball competitive. But, as new NCAA head Charlie Baker points out, as universities become more directly involved in NIL, Title IX will become an issue.

Realistically, with very few exceptions like wrestling in Iowa, women’s basketball at South Carolina, UConn and Iowa as long as Caitlin Clark is in school and baseball and hockey at some locales, men’s basketball and especially football is driving the money train. The fun part is going to be watching schools in the Situational Ethics Conference realize that they may have to pay the quarterback and the middle blocker on the women’s volleyball team the same.

That’s when you’ll see the real counter-revolution and that’s also when the loopholes will be ruthlessly found and exploited.