Jensen: What's wrong with college players transferring to bigger programs?
Note to Division I basketball coaches in "non-power" leagues: Your window for success is shorter than ever. Get your recruits, start winning, keep winning, or you'll find your better ballplayers will start thinking about transferring out and your program may start moving in the wrong direction.
Note to Division I basketball coaches in "non-power" leagues: Your window for success is shorter than ever.
Get your recruits, start winning, keep winning, or you'll find your better ballplayers will start thinking about transferring out and your program may start moving in the wrong direction.
The players know all this already. Their friends know it. Their handlers know it. Prove yourself in a low- or mid-major league, and bigger programs will show interest.
The NCAA has a term for all this. Up transfers. That's exactly what it sounds like, players moving on up.
A fair share are the fifth-year transfers who get their degree at one school, still have a year of eligibility remaining and use it at another school, immediately eligible. Think of Damion Lee's moving from Drexel to Louisville.
The success of the team the player is leaving clearly is part of the equation. Looking at ESPN.com's comprehensive transfer lists, only one of 18 non-Ivy graduate transfers who are on track to transfer up to a higher level played in a postseason tournament last season, and that tournament was the third-tier CBI.
Of 13 underclassmen who appear ticketed for an up-transfer - again, according to information collected by ESPN.com - not one played in a postseason tournament. Call that significant. If teams are winning conference titles or even seriously contending for one, their young players are less likely to think about transferring.
Make no mistake: prove yourself in a league like the Colonial, which has talent just under the Power 5 level, and you'll have options. Of the 13 underclassmen ticketed for up transfers, all just finished their freshman or sophomore year, and 12 of the 13 averaged at least 9.8 points a game. The exception was a freshman 7-footer who averaged 6.5 points in 16.4 minutes a game at Drake.
In some ways, this means the market simply is correcting itself. Recruits often have to commit midway through high school, and for some their games aren't mature enough at age 16 to interest the big boys. By age 19, they could be a different player, and then the big boys see the upside of a player who has already proven he can handle a college course load and college life and produce on the court.
If you argue that this is fine, that basketball players should have the same right to transfer as any other student, you've got a strong case. If it also means coaches have to prove their worth all the time, that's fair, too. But let's argue that other players - the ones without the best options to transfer - are hurt by all this, committing to play on a team that may never coalesce into a real unit. That player who scored 23.1 points a game as a sophomore at Sacred Heart? He's not your teammate anymore. He's at Cincinnati. A big 16.4 ppg. season as a freshman at Maine? Gone to VCU.
The Colonial is all too aware of this. This spring or last, the league has seen players leave Drexel, Delaware, Towson, Elon, and Charleston for leagues perceived as higher level. The circumstances are all different. There's a good chance Terrell Allen would not have left Drexel if not for a coaching change. He announced Thursday that he's headed to Central Florida.
Kory Holden left Delaware just before a coaching change and announced he is headed for South Carolina. In addition to Lee's leaving last season, 2015 CAA rookie of the year Elijah Bryant of Elon transferred to BYU after his freshman year.
Make no mistake: A team in a mid-major league like the Colonial will grab a low-major player in the same circumstance. The whole food chain is in play here.
This spring, one coach heard about an all-league player from the Northeast Conference who looked at transferring and was getting big-time interest, and the player then called an all-league player from another Northeast school, saying, "You've got to think about this."
To give an idea of how much coaches are thinking about the issue, here's a tweet this week from Loyola (Md.) assistant Josh Loeffler, a Swarthmore College graduate: "It's a good [thing] Damian Lillard and CJ McCollum transferred to bigger schools mid-career in order to fulfill their pro dreams. . . . oh wait." The Portland Trail Blazers' backcourt mates, proven NBA guards, were both first-round picks, out of Weber State and Lehigh.
Coaches look at social media as a big factor here, that players who enjoyed seeing themselves highlighted with all their recruiting possibilities, they get to do it again with maybe a higher-level list of schools.
One conference official at a league on the losing-players end of this said, "The Power 5 guys, at their staff meetings, they've got to be looking at our rosters. . . . I often ask our coaches, 'How often do you have to re-recruit your own players?' They say, 'Every day.' "
Again, that isn't such a bad thing, given the amount of work required of a Division I basketball player. And if coaches can leave on a dime, why not players?
"I always wondered when I became athletic director how it was possible to restrict student-athlete movement when a coach could pick up his desk and go," said Drexel AD Eric Zillmer, an Army brat himself used to lifelong movement.
Zillmer talks of how the NCAA "and many schools that really benefit from sports are interested in not being sued," so student-athlete welfare is a popular theme.
No, it doesn't make for a level playing field. Zillmer knows that. There may even be financial incentives to transfer if you're moving from a league that doesn't provide full cost of attendance to one that does. That would feel like a raise.
And what's wrong with that?
"Here's what wrong with it," Zillmer said. "In professional sports, you're trading athletes according to fair-market value. Those players are commodities. In college athletics, end of day, you're also convincing everyone these are student-athletes. They are not commodities. . . . The problem is the haves will have more, and the have-nots will have less."
And a level playing field becomes even more of a myth, which, Zillmer argues, ultimately hurts everyone.
"It's like you're playing Monopoly," Zillmer said, fully aware of how this board is laid out.
@jensenoffcampus