Transfer Season as a Non-Revenue Athlete

Its transfer season, which means the college athletic blogs and player watching twitter accounts are all blowing up. Football transfer portal entries, rumors of potential transfers, rumors of rumors of transfer potentials…You get it. It’s a circus. 

But that circus pretty much only focuses on football and basketball. This reality is reflective of a greater issue at play– non-revenue athletes are forced to operate under NCAA rules not designed for their sport. 

On the surface this doesn’t seem like a big deal, but the result is an asymmetric power dynamic that favors the school throughout the transfer process. 

In order to even begin exploring their options, athletes must first officially enter into the transfer portal. When they take this step, two rules are triggered– one, a player can officially start talking to other coaches to explore other programs and two, their current coach can immediately revoke their scholarship for the remainder of their career beginning with the following semester or quarter.

So, even if after exploring their options, a student-athlete decides they would rather stay at their current school, they have already given up their claim to their scholarship and their coach has every right to redistribute the money amongst other players. 

This, of course, is just the potential formal repercussion. The unofficial ramifications that can occur from exploring one's options often include cuts in playing time, isolation from teammates, ruining of relationships with coaches, and a variety of other things that impact your day to day experience as a student-athlete.

Though the NCAA transfer rule is less than ideal for revenue sport athletes, it isn’t harmful to them in the way it is to the rest of the student-athlete population. Most of the football and basketball athletes are on (and will continue to be on) full scholarships. Revenue sports are given more scholarships to allocate to players, meaning there is less competition amongst teammates for scholarships. 

For non-revenue sports athletes, transfer futures are much more ambiguous, especially in game sports that don’t rely on straight statistics like race times or batting averages. 

This type of limitation has never been acceptable in any other context of our regular employment world. If you are unhappy working for one company, there is no law stopping you from exploring opportunities at different companies. You’re not forced to wear a scarlet letter alerting the world of your thought process, or even forced to explain yourself. Most certainly you are not required to tell your boss if you are exploring your options. 

Instead, you simply hand in your two weeks notice and go your separate ways with your employer, no hard feelings. In fact, LinkedIn, Indeed, and Glassdoor have all become billion dollar companies because of this system. 

On top of all of this, there is no clear benefit to the NCAA monetarily by requiring the use of the transfer portal for non-revenue sport athletes. So why does the NCAA do it? 

To give the advantage to the schools and coaches in controlling athletes' futures. 

Even if this reality has no malicious intent and the system is simply a remnant of the rules designed for mens football and basketball, it doesn’t excuse the practice and shows the NCAA’s lack of interest in it’s athletes wellbeing. 

If this argument feels eerily familiar, it’s because a similar one was posed by advocates fighting for athletes to access their NIL rights. 

For years, the NCAA and supporters preached that allowing athletes access to their own NIL rights would ruin college athletics as we know it. The rules were changed over the summer and the industry of college athletics seems to be alive and well– clearly, they have survived this apparent death sentence. 

Saddest of all, the non-revenue transfer story isn’t one that's covered in the media coverage following student-athletics. These athletes aren’t the ones with the big names making headlines for ESPNU. It’s also an issue that's relatively invisible to the outside world. The only reason I even know about it is because I was considering transferring and resultedly up close and personal with the potential ramifications.

Change is easiest to make when the problem is visible and gains attention from those with a voice. Many of the athletes who consider transferring end up quitting out of unhappiness or because they don’t find a good fit at a new college. At this point, they are “out” of the world of college athletics and their experiences are lost from the narrative. 

This doesn’t mean the reality is any less problematic– just silenced. 

Over 45% of college athletes report that their experience on their team is not what they expected. This leads to a significant number of them wanting or needing to transfer. 

That data was published in a study by the NCAA, illustrating that the organization is more than aware of the number of athletes that fall out of it’s program. Moreover, they have yet to direct resources to the issue. 

Unsurprisingly, the NCAA doesn’t have any public data on the number of student-athletes that quit their careers early. Only glowing results of it’s alumni’s success in the world after college. 

As it looks to redraft a constitution, maybe the NCAA should consider treating it’s athletes like the valuable commodities they are instead of replaceable pawns at their disposal. 

Only 7% of high school athletes make it to college, and less than 2% to the DI level –where these transfer rules are most applicable. Athletes aren’t quitting because they can’t hang at the highest level, they’ve been playing at the top level their whole lives. 

There is a greater issue at play that the NCAA has a responsibility to help fix. 

-Maggie