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Friday, May 2, 2008
With Bennett’s transfer, the NCAA gets it right
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sometimes, common sense wins out in college sports, and it appears to be happening with transfers like Taylor Bennett’s.
I checked with the NCAA about Bennett’s transfer to Louisiana Tech to see how common such transfers are. Remember that the NCAA’s member schools overrode a rule allowing players like Bennett, who graduated from their original school, to transfer and play immediately at another Division I-A school. That wasn’t the end of it, however.
Those who voted to override the rule were worried it would create a system of free agency, where players who were able to graduate before exhausting their eligibility would be “re-recruited” by other schools.
“I think the fear is exaggerated,” NCAA president Myles Brand said in a 2007 podcast.
And so, essentially, Brand and the NCAA created a workaround. The waiver process Bennett used to be able to play at Louisiana Tech has been used successfully by about 30 Division I athletes since July 1, 2007, NCAA spokesman Erik Christianson told me. That’s actually more than took advantage of the graduate student transfer rule in the one year for which it applied.
“For any individual who has legitimate academic reasons to transfer after graduating, we will grant it,” Brand said.
Determining what is a “legitimate academic reason” is a case-by-case process. Whether to grant a waiver is based on “why the student-athlete is transferring, whether the specific graduate degree is offered at the previous institution, and whether the previous institution supports the waiver,” Christianson wrote in an e-mail.
Do I think there is some fiction at work here? Yes. If Chan Gailey were still Georgia Tech’s coach, I bet Bennett would have found a graduate program at Georgia Tech that suited him just fine, at least for the one semester he’d need to play his senior season. Or maybe he would have taken a different course load this spring and extended his undergraduate career through the fall.
But at least the waiver process tilts the equation back in favor of the athletes. When that happens, the NCAA is getting something right.
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