The One-Time Transfer Rule Will Change College Athletics; the Florida Gators Have Been Preparing

Can the Florida Gators keep up with changing athletics? Photo Credit: Alex Shepherd

Dan Mullen has known this was coming for a while.

He even began to allude to the possibility back in early 2019.

“I don’t think everybody wants it to be open recruiting every single year,” said the Florida Gators head coach back on March 11, 2019. “You’d have to really change the rules in college football and your number of signees and the numbers and guys you can bring in and initials in the class and how you’d replace guys.”

Fast forward two years and the NCAA has officially passed the one-time transfer rule. This will allow college athletes to transfer to a new school one time without penalty or having to sit out for any amount of time.

In a release from the NCAA, Council vice chair Jon Steinbrecher, who chairs the Working Group on Transfers and is commissioner of the Mid-American Conference said, “Allowing student-athletes a one-time opportunity to transfer and compete immediately provides a uniform, equitable and understandable approach that benefits all student-athletes. The decision is consistent with Division I’s goal of modernizing its rules to prioritize student-athlete opportunity and choice.”

Whether a proponent or opponent of the rule, it’s hard to ignore the fact the NCAA brought this upon themselves. As Steinbrecher noted, the goal has become “modernizing its rules to prioritize student-athlete opportunity and choice.” This is necessary because the NCAA did the exact opposite for so long.

The organization continued to hurt themselves by denying certain waivers while approving others, with little to no rhyme or reasoning from one decision to the next. There is of course an argument that some should have been denied while others approved, but the NCAA rarely drew those lines where one would assume they should be drawn.

In the end, the easiest course of action forward—knowing they’d have to adapt or die—was to issue a unilateral standard across the board for the first move. And coaches have braced themselves for the turning tide.

“I think you’re going to see a lot more transfers down the road, to be honest with you, because of the new NCAA rules that they’re putting into place,” Mullen said on December 7, 2020. “I don’t know if they’re in place yet but appear to be going into place. So, I think you might just see that a little more coming in the future anyway.”

Fast forward two weeks, to the early signing day on December 20, 2020 and Mullen warned yet again of how the landscape of college football was about to drastically change.

“I think there’s so much uncertainty when it comes to the transfer aspect with the NCAA, what’s it going to be moving forward. In every area. I think we have a couple of spots for transfers still on our team. I think if you ask almost every coach around the country, they have a lot of concerns about the direction that’s heading.

“Let me explain it this way: not concerns of, ‘ok, hey, we can’t let guys transfer.’ I mean, obviously that’s coming. I think coaches understand there’s going to be a lot of little things that go along with that, that people don’t understand yet or don’t know yet, and all of a sudden, you’re going to look – and it might be a month from now, might be six months from now, might be two years from now – all of a sudden, ‘hey, we didn’t realize all this would come with it and we better change a lot of different rules to get caught up.’

“Because I do think a lot of the different rules that are in place don’t match the rules that they’re trying … the transfer rules that are coming, the current recruiting rules don’t match, they don’t meld. There’s a lot of concerns from coaches around the country about how that’s all going to work out.”

The concerns are certainly still there, because the NCAA is nothing if not notoriously slow. But as the rules are put in to place and programs learn to adjust, schools can either choose to dig in their heels in protest or use the new rules to their advantage.

On Thursday, speaking to the local media in Tuscaloosa, Alabama Crimson Tide head coach Nick Saban said of the near perennial National Champions, “We do [have a plan], we have thought about a strategy that we're going to use. You’ve heard me speak about this before, but now that it is a rule, we're going to adapt to it and make it an advantage for us. I think what's going to happen as you see how often in a lot of leagues, you know the good players go to a good team and the bad players leave good teams because they're not playing.

“So is that going to make the rich get richer? I don't know. You can decide that, but we will only look for transfers that can really, that are going to help our team be better.”

The door will swing both ways. Transfers will leave, but transfers will also come in and Mullen has developed a quick reputation for being one of the best recruiters yet out of the transfer portal. Still, there are guaranteed to be some growing pains. As Mullen said back in early 2019, this will create a bit of free agency in college football. That can be both excruciating and exciting, because while it’s going to create free agency like the NFL, it’s still college football.

“We’re not the NFL where we get to go do interviews and combines and check everything out,” said Mullen in March.

"You’ve gotta try the best you can to get the right fit. You talk to the guys a lot about what you need, what your expectations are, what you’re looking for, and I think a lot of those guys, transfers are different than maybe in recruiting. Those guys have been in programs for a while. They understand what’s going on. When you sit down and say, this is where we’re at, this is what I’m looking for, and this is what I need from you. That’s the role. That’s how I see this working.

“Guys look and they say, ‘I fit that. That’s what I’m looking for. This is a situation that I’m looking for and I fit what coach needs and that style of program.’ It’s different than maybe recruiting with high school guys because these guys have kind of been through it. When you’re talking to them about the needs and how it works and how it fits, they’ve experienced playing a lot of college football, so they know what’s going on.”

This is working on the other side of campus as well. After an exodus of players, head basketball coach Mike White has welcomed four transfers: CJ Felder (Boston College), Phlandrous Fleming Jr. (Charleston Southern), Myreon Jones (Penn State) and Brandon McKissic (Missouri-Kansas City).

According to a release by UF, McKissic and Fleming have both been defensive player of the year and all-league performers in their respective conferences, while Felder and Jones both have a track record of success on power conference teams.

Gainesville has become a favorite destination for high-impact transfers, who have played significant roles on recent Florida teams. Most recently, the Gators have placed an incoming transfer on the All-SEC team each of the past two seasons (Colin Castleton, Kerry Blackshear Jr.). In addition to Castleton, the Gators’ starting five this past season also regularly included transfers Tyree Appleby and Anthony Duruji.

In a world where coaches make promises and leave, families call kids home and in some cases, yes, athletes simply make a rash decision, the ability to correct a mistake can make or break their future. As such, college athletics are changing, a necessary adaptation for survival. Coaches have been preparing for the dynamic shift for years, preparing for the inevitable. But one thing will remain the same, at least as far as Dan Mullen is concerned. It’s the perspective he had back in March 2019, and still keeps to this day.

“I hope guys are here because they want to be Florida Gators, and they want to be part of our program. It’s pretty easy to want to be here. If you don’t want to be here, there’s a specific reason. I’d think we did a poor job recruiting if guys were coming in and then immediately walking out the door because it was something different than what they thought it would be and we lied to them during recruiting, or we sold them on a dream that wasn’t true.”