Kentucky's football coach proposes a tweak to the NCAA’s grad transfer rule

Mark Stoops suggests adding a redshirt year for players who’d otherwise be free to play right away.

Under current rules, college athletic departments get to choose whether players are released from their scholarships when they want to transfer elsewhere. That gives schools a de facto right to block players from transferring at all. For years, athletic administrators have gotten away with calling players “amateurs” and not paying them while retaining the option to keep them from transferring. The NCAA gets to have its cake and eat it too, all at its athletes’ expense.

That might soon change. An NCAA committee says it wants to take scholarship releases out of schools’ hands, which would allow players a lot more freedom.

The typical exception: the graduate transfer rule. A graduate with one year of eligibility remaining is free to play for another school.

At SEC Media Days on Wednesday, Kentucky coach Mark Stoops came out in support of the rule and offered a tweak:

I think with the transfer rule, if a player wants to transfer because of academic reasons and go to another school, if they graduated and you don't offer the program that they want, then let them go. You know? Let them go to the school that they want.

[SEC coaches] don't want ... the transfers to happen within our league just simply because it's getting to be a free agency. If it's about academics, then by all means go for your education at some school, and I think there's plenty of schools outside the SEC that they can further their education. I might suggest that if they want transfer for academic reasons, maybe redshirt them and give them two years, if it's about academics. Let's help these guys. Let's give them two years. Just make them sit out so it's not free agency. It's an opportunity for them to further their education. Let's help them out and redshirt them and make that school pay for two years and play one.

The current rule, in addition to letting schools block players, requires a one-year “academic residency” period for most transfers after they get to their new school.

That means players pause their eligibility clocks and can’t play in games for a season.

Reasonable people can disagree about the academic residency requirement. I don’t like it because it seems like an implicit threat to players who might want a change in scenery for any number of reasons. But if you think the player needs a year to adjust to a new school, that thought can come from a good place.

Extending that to the grad transfer rule would make it so transferring players could complete post-graduate degrees, but it’d also further delay their pro careers. It would make the decision even more complicated for players.

(This is as good a place as any to add the disclaimer that coaches can leave their jobs whenever and not have to sit out at all. Stoops has coached at nine different places since 1990 and has never had to wait a year to get back on the field.)

Correction: A previous version of this story cited an incorrect transcript by ASAP Sports, which made it seem Stoops had called for transferring players to be ineligible for two years.