On the balance sheet for graduate transfers, Georgia Tech basketball coach Brian Gregory is running safely in the black. The NCAA rule that allows athletes with eligibility remaining to transfer without having to sit out a season if they’ve already graduated brought Gregory his starting center for the 2014-15 season (Demarco Cox) and his likely starting shooting guard for next season (Adam Smith).
While opinions on the rule are split among coaches and administrators, Gregory’s position is easy to guess. He argues his side, though, not only as a coach who has benefited from it, but also as the son of a high-school principal.
“I think we’ve got to be careful in that we’re upset when guys leave school after one year or two years and don’t get their degree,” Gregory said at the ACC spring meetings last week in Amelia Island, Fla. “Now we’re going to be upset with guys who have earned their degree that want to do something different?”
The ACC took no stance on the matter at its meeting, but expects that it will be debated on a national level and possibly changed. One suggestion is that athletes seeking to transfer after graduating be required to sit out a season, as is the case with standard transfers, and receive an extra year to play a fourth season, if necessary. This would dissuade transferring for purely athletic motivations.
“It’s just a ‘get to play somewhere else and wear a different color jersey’ (rule),” Pittsburgh football coach Pat Narduzzi said. “It’s not a good landscape.”
For many if not most transfers, it would be difficult to debate the first part of Narduzzi’s contention. Graduate transfers have mushroomed, particularly in men’s basketball, as standard transfers have done the same. Typically, athletes have sought more playing time or perhaps a higher level of competition. James White is a rising senior from Jonesboro who graduated from Arkansas-Little Rock. Tech is among his options. He told an Alabama news web site, “I want to go somewhere where I can get into the (NCAA) tournament.”
The Tech football team will receive Stanford graduate transfer Patrick Skov, a fullback who was accepted into the Tech business school. While acknowledging that he is an academic fit, coach Paul Johnson said that Skov was intrigued by Tech after watching the Yellow Jackets play in the ACC Championship game.
It is a considerable distance from the rule’s origins, according to Tech athletic director Mike Bobinski.
“I remember when the rule was enacted, and the original concept was if you did have eligibility remaining and your particular institution didn’t offer a graduate program that you were interested in pursuing, then you could go somewhere else, exhaust that eligibility without penalty and pursue that graduate program,” Bobinski said. “That’s not really how it’s played out.”
The NCAA tracked 353 graduate transfers in 2011 and 2012 and was able to determine academic outcomes for 258. About half were football or basketball players. Of the football players, 68 percent had withdrawn after two years, 24 percent had graduated and seven percent were still enrolled. Nearly 40 percent departed by the end of their first graduate term. Among men’s basketball players, 59 percent had withdrawn, 32 had graduated and nine percent were still enrolled.
Of Gregory’s two graduate transfers — Cox and guard Pierre Jordan — Cox left school shortly after the Yellow Jackets’ season ended to sign a contract with the Indianapolis Colts to try his hand at football. Jordan earned a master’s degree in building construction.
Gregory had a rather practical rebuttal to concerns about athletes not obtaining degrees at their new schools.
“If they stayed at the school that they’re at, what are they going to do that next year anyway?” Gregory asked. “Are they going to start a master’s program? Well, they’ve only got one year left to play there, too. So they’re not going to earn it there, either.”
The other concern comes mostly from coaching ranks, particularly from those who don’t like the idea of players whom they’ve invested in jilting them as they go into their senior seasons.
Were a team member to leave Pitt as a graduate, “What does that do for Pitt?” Narduzzi asked. “That doesn’t do a whole bunch. Now all of the sudden, you could have used that scholarship on a kid. Here we are trying to graduate our kids early and get them out in four, 3 1/2 years, now all of the sudden they’re leaving you.”
The usage of the rule fits with a movement within college sports for the athletes to receive more in terms of stipends, meals, insurance and other matters of welfare. Given that coaches routinely jump to better jobs, leaving behind athletes they’ve recruited, coached and often assured that they will stay for the entirety of their careers, perhaps it isn’t the worst thing if those privileges are shared around the table.
“That’s what happens in the real world,” Gregory said. “If someone’s at Harvard’s grad school in business and is offered a $500,000 job at a Fortune 500 job that they didn’t have upon entry, they would probably leave (Harvard) and start that, knowing that they can go back. No one would have a problem with that.”
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