Opinion: Sit back and enjoy as college football coaches are triggered by transfer rule

The best reason for the NCAA to get rid or change its arcane transfer rules and allow every athlete a one-time free pass to change schools without penalty is that it’s the right thing to do. 

But the second-best reason is the entertainment value for the rest of us when millionaire coaches start moaning and complaining about how transfers and free agency are ruining the sport. And if that happens, we know it will be a collective freak-out for the ages because it’s already starting. 

Even when the sanctimony and hypocrisy they’re serving up is as nauseating as week-old fish, some college coaches just can’t help themselves from telling us it’s a Michelin-starred meal.

On the day college football programs completed their recruiting classes for 2020, it was notable that two of the country’s least credible sources on the topic of loyalty decided to make it known how much contempt they have for players who want to explore their options or believe they might have a made a mistake in their initial choice of schools. 

UConn coach Randy Edsall said on Wednesday he will not take players who enter the transfer portal because they often “think they’re enabled and entitled” and “they’ve got issues.” (Photo: David Butler II, USA TODAY Sports)

UConn’s Randy Edsall, who has made a habit of throwing around the word commitment during his career but only applying it in one direction, said Wednesday that he didn’t want to take transfers into his program. According to the Hartford Courant, his reasoning was that players who enter the transfer portal often “think they’re enabled and entitled” and “they’ve got issues.”

Meanwhile, Virginia Tech’s Justin Fuente said that any of his players who entered the portal — which only means they’re allowed to talk to other schools, not that they’re definitely transferring — wouldn’t be allowed to come back even if they wanted to.

RECRUITING: Where the top 25 football prospects in the 2020 class are signing

Of course, Fuente has that right within the rules. But coming from the guy who negotiated his current employment while there were games left in the 2015 season at Memphis and just a few weeks ago came back to Virginia Tech after interviewing for the Baylor job, let’s just say a little self-awareness would go a long way.

We get it, coaches. Transfers make your job more difficult, and the advent of the portal — which allows athletes to put their name on the market without getting their coach’s permission — has taken much of your control away. Boo hoo.

But is a little pragmatism too much to expect from guys making millions of dollars to coach football?

Certainly the College Football Playoff is the last thing on Edsall’s mind, given that his second stint at Connecticut has yielded a 6-30 record, but maybe he should have watched a little. He would have learned that national champion LSU started a Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback who went through the portal because he was buried on the depth chart at Ohio State. He would have also learned that two other Heisman finalists and Playoff starters were transfers, as well as the previous two Heisman winners in Kyler Murray and Baker Mayfield 

The only “issues” those guys had is that they were really awesome players who ended up in great situations.

Edsall of all people making a generalized value judgment about any player based on nothing more than the fact they decided to change schools is a great example of why coaches are losing this argument and why eventually they’ll be forced to adapt to a reality they deeply fear. 

What most people remember about Edsall, if they remember anything, is that he took UConn to the Fiesta Bowl almost out of nowhere in 2010 and then abandoned ship literally as fast as he could, calling Maryland his “dream job.”

That doesn’t make Edsall a bad guy. He maximized his situation and took a better career opportunity when it was presented to him. But when he got to Maryland, Edsall made national news for trying to block quarterback Danny O’Brien from transferring to Vanderbilt and playing for his former offensive coordinator James Franklin. 

Edsall was on the wrong side of history on that one, too. Now, thankfully, the NCAA doesn’t give coaches the power to pick and choose certain schools where their former players can’t transfer. 

Edsall has also been involved in some high-profile situations where he pulled scholarship offers from recruits close to signing day. Maybe they got hurt and it was uncertain if they’d be able to play as well after the injury. When he got to UConn the second time, there were players committed to the previous staff who Edsall deemed not good enough.

Those situations are odious, particularly when it’s late in the game and kids are scrambling for other options. And Edsall certainly isn’t the only one who’s done it. But that reality illustrates why it’s completely unfair to say that kids who transfer have character flaws or that they’re somehow damaged goods.

While there are certainly kids who transfer simply because they’re impatient or respond poorly to coaching, college athletes are susceptible to the same issues as every other 18- or 19-year old. 

Whether it’s a bad social fit or the coaches weren’t who they appeared to be during recruiting or they partied too much as freshmen and needed a change of scenery or they just weren’t quite going to be good enough to start for a Power Five doesn’t make much difference. If everyone got one no-questions-asked mulligan on their college choice without having to sit out a year, the reasons for leaving wouldn’t really matter. 

That may very well be where college athletics is headed. Currently, the NCAA makes athletes in only five sports sit out a year: Football, men’s and women’s basketball, baseball and hockey. Surprise, surprise — those are the sports that actually generate significant revenue for the NCAA. 

But behind the scenes, more and more administrators are coming around to the idea of the one-time transfer exception. A working group led by Mid-American Conference commissioner Jon Steinbrecher is currently studying the issue and will issue some kind of recommendation this year to improve transfer rules.

In the meantime, though, let’s enjoy these guys boiling over with nonsense about transfers while we still can. Because the trend toward more freedom of movement isn’t going anywhere. It’s the coaches who can’t accept it and adapt to it who won’t be around much longer. 

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