Who was it who said — referring to the NCAA’s graduate student transfer rule, “we gotta close that loophole!” ? Yep, it was Florida Gator football coach Urban Meyer… and what seemed like only moments later he brings in a ‘ringer’..er… a ‘graduate’ student.
Ryan Smith, a former athlete under Urban Meyer at Utah transfers to Florida. His reasons seem more athletic than academic… but so be it.
Here’s how one of Urban’s local papers reported the recent NCAA decision to eliminate the Graduate transfer rule:
The override came despite overwhelming support by the NCAA’s Student-Athletic Advisory Committee.
“I think a lot of coaches and athletic directors are very frightened. Fear drove the circumstances and won,” said David Goldfield, a professor and faculty athletic representative from North Carolina-Charlotte. “All of us here — coaches, athletic representatives or administrators — are in the business of helping students fulfill their dreams, whether they’re academic or athletic. This override contradicts that objective.”
As the NCAA Advisory committee said: “fear drove the circumstances and won.”
Karen wrote a nice blog about the NCAA transfer policy back in August.
As Karen said: “The main reason that athletes go to college is to get a college education– sometimes coaches and others in the athletic department sometimes forget that.”
This policy also hurts female athletes :
The issue is not as simple as many coaches would like everyone to believe… and they really can’t offer any justification for blocking or penalizing someone who wants to leave or pursue their academic career.
Very few athletes who went on to graduate school this year (less than 1%) took advantage of the former transfer rule…
Let them go, Urbans out there.. It shouldn’t all be about you.
Roger Freberg