Proposed Transfer Rule Highlights Something Mike Gundy Has Said for Years

This may have been buried over the last month with an OSU basketball team that ended the season on a 9-3 run and, you know, a global pandemic, but the transfer rules in college football and basketball might be changing.

Current rule: If you transfer to another FBS program, you have to sit a year.
Proposed rule: If you transfer to another FBS program, you can play immediately.

Here are the details from the NCAA.

Division I student-athletes in all sports could transfer and compete immediately if a concept under consideration by the Transfer Waiver Working Group is adopted by the Division I Council.

“The current system is unsustainable. Working group members believe it’s time to bring our transfer rules more in line with today’s college landscape,” said working group chair Jon Steinbrecher, commissioner of the Mid-American Conference. “This concept provides a uniform approach that is understandable, predictable and objective. Most importantly, it benefits students.”

This will eventually pass, and college sports will have some form of free agency. How you feel about this doesn’t really matter because it’s going to happen at some point. Here’s how it would affect Oklahoma State.

1. C.J. Moore could transfer to Texas and be eligible in 2020.
2. Collin Clay, who transferred to OSU from Arkansas, would be eligible in 2020.

Clay might be eligible regardless because currently players can apply for a waiver, and often moving closer to home combined with a coaching change at the school you were at is a recipe for receiving that waiver.

The implications here are innumerable. What currently only happens with graduate transfers — the Josh Furmans of the world — could happen with high-quality freshmen, sophomores and juniors. Dude might be making a game-saving tackle to win the Cotton Bowl for Wisconsin one year and covering Big 12 receivers for Baylor the next. Wild.

This would likely benefit Oklahoma State. They have had success with the transfer portal since its existence and are bringing in a nice group for 2020 that includes Clay, Josh Sills and Christian Holmes. Real contributors.

However, it also poses problems for schools across the board. Problems Mike Gundy has been hollering about for years. Here’s a good Athletic article on those problems.

We wrote extensively last spring about the math behind the portal and the reality that, because FBS schools are capped at 25 signees per year, they simply don’t have much room to sign transfers. The math hasn’t changed much in this second portal cycle. The average size of 2020’s top 25 recruiting classes, per the 247Sports Composite, was 23.3 commits. Schools have room to add a couple transfers, but that’s all. And when your own players elect to transfer, you can’t just log onto the portal and find a player to replace them.

The math gets weird because you can apply different players to different classes when they transfer based on when they transfer, but the bottom line is that when you sign a lot of guys out of high school — OSU signed 21 in both 2019 and 2020 — it’s difficult to receive transfers because of the scholarship limits.

This is the part Gundy has talked about for several years, ever since the transfer portal was an idea. He saw this part of it coming, and noted that you need to be able to wipe scholarships off the books when a player transfers so that you’re not constantly short players. The Big 12 is currently working toward a semi-solution on that.

These are the tricky realities of the current scholarship limits. The good news is those limits could be changing soon. The Big 12 and MAC have put forth a proposal to amend the initial counter limit. FBS schools would be able to sign up to 30 players in one year instead of 25, but they’d be limited to 50 signees over a rolling two-year period. That proposal is ready to be voted on by the Division I Council and, if approved, would go into effect on Aug. 1.

Kansas athletic director Jeff Long has been pushing for it for more than a year, in the hopes of finding a remedy for the football program’s troubling scholarship debt and getting back to an 85-man roster. The timing for the proposal really couldn’t be better, as administrators and coaches across the country wonder how much tougher roster management is about to get. [Athletic]

This is a good thing and will alleviate some of the tension teams feel when players transfer and they try to backfill those spots with transfers into their schools. In theory, right now if 15 players transfer out of the 2020 class next year, OSU can’t just fill all those spots with transfers. They’re just … lost, which isn’t right or fair.

As usual, Gundy was ahead of the curve here. Don’t let the mullet and snake stories fool you, he’s smart when it comes to very specific, nuanced details within the world of college football, and this is yet another of those that he nailed far ahead of when others started to notice it.