To say the least, conference leaders find themselves in a difficult position.
Much like the so-called ban on wearing headphones during the workday at one of my former workplaces, the NCAA has rules that aren’t really rules.
As sports supervisors have eased restrictions on transfers, ESPN’s Alex Scarborough has a new article on what college football coaches are calling an explosion of one of the aforementioned non-rules, roster tampering. It’s no surprise that players are even getting into recruiting their rivals, according to reports from Scarborough.
Fortunately, the stakes here seem pretty low for anyone who doesn’t make a fortune through coaching. It’s not at all clear that tampering is a bad thing for players. The truth is that some players might make bad decisions changing schools, but just as many might have their eyes opened to better opportunities after being courted by another program.
Yet whining is what college football coaches do, by their nature. And just like the legendary shenanigans that take place on the high school recruiting trail, you can bet that the futility of trying to deter tampering won’t stop jilted coaches from raising a ruckus when the stars leave town. Therein lies a problem for college athletic conferences.
For example, let’s say a starting defensive tackle was just kicked off Team X, leaving the best team in his conference dangerously thin at the position. One of the best DTs in the conference, Player A, plays for Team Y, which is a member of the same conference as X.
Now imagine that the defensive line coach of team if he had to decide he wanted to transfer…and if he had to choose X as his new school… a starting position would be waiting for him there. Since X has a better team than Y, A enters the transfer portal and signs up with X within a few weeks. Team Y contacts conference headquarters to file a complaint that X tampered with a player on roster Y.
Consider the thorny conflict of interest this presents for the league office. On one hand, he could launch a credible investigation into the allegations and risk crippling his best program. On the other hand, conference executives could ignore the complaint, raising the possibility of Team Y leaking its complaints to the media or attempting to appropriate Team X’s NCAA. (X could also treat this decision by the conference as a license to pilfer players from other teams.)
In short: the conference office really does not want to be in the position of deciding these kinds of disputes between its members. The problem is the league doesn’t want to involve the NCAA either.
In the past, conferences have attempted to avoid such situations by imposing draconian restrictions on intra-conference transfers. For example, when Baker Mayfield was transferred from Texas Tech Red Raiders At Oklahoma Early, he missed the 2014 season and OU officials still had to fight to ensure the former backup wouldn’t sacrifice a year of eligibility. The goal was to make transferring to another conference school unappealing to the player and potential suitors, thereby discouraging any tampering.
Obviously, it won’t fly anymore. Direct restrictions on player movement are why we are in this position currently. With this in mind, expect conferences to come up with more subtle ways to deter transfers between their own members.
In fact, conferences can still go a long way toward discouraging roster tampering among their members by requiring schools to pay a higher price to accept an intra-conference transfer. Specifically, that might involve counting an intra-conference transfer as two or three scholarships against the team’s limit of 85. Really need the player’s services if he actually occupied two spots on the roster. If the demand for intra-conference transfers decreases, so does the temptation to trade between those schools.
So, for the sake of harmony at the conference, I hope they eventually adopt something along these lines.
