This college sports story will have the biggest immediate impact, but no one is talking about it

On April 1, 2021, the NCAA’s primary legislative body met to discuss a massive change to one of the NCAA’s longest standing rules regarding athletes who want to transfer from one college to another.

The past month of college sports news has been overwhelming. It has been difficult to keep up with the coverage of the March 30 Supreme Court oral arguments for the NCAA v. Alston case, the glaring inequities between the NCAA’s treatment of women and men, and the head-spinning developments concerning name, image, and likeness legislation. But, another story is brewing below the surface and it could immediately impact every Division I athlete.

Yesterday, the NCAA’s Division I Council met to finalize changes to the NCAA’s transfer rule, which has been in place for decades. Currently, an athlete who transfers from one NCAA school to another cannot compete for the new school’s team until the athlete has one full academic year of residence at the new school. The transfer limbo is big subject of debate. Many athletes feel that sitting out for one year is unfair, especially when college coaches and administrators jump from school to school without restriction. The NCAA has tinkered around the edges for years with various waivers and exceptions baked into the transfer legislation. The most recent change allows athletes to leave their school and play immediately elsewhere if the head coach at the original school departed.

On April 15, 2021, the Division I Council will meet to approve an amendment that would allow all athletes the ability to immediately transfer without sitting out. After the Council approves the rule, the NCAA’s Board of Governors must also approve it. Once the Board signs off, the transfer legislation would be effective immediately.

Under the proposed change, every athlete can transfer at least once — no questions asked. Athletes would have to notify their schools of their intent to transfer by a prescribed date (May 1 for fall and winter sport athletes; July 1 for spring sport athletes).

Undoubtedly, this will have a huge impact on college sports. Before an athlete can move from one school to another, she or he must sign up for the “transfer portal.” This portal is a recent creation that helps athletes notify other schools of their intent to transfer. When you compare previous years’ data to this year’s, you can easily see how helpful the new transfer rule might be for athletes.

As of March 30, 2021, over 750 names are in the Division I women’s basketball transfer portal and 1,000 are in the men’s basketball transfer portal. The basketball season is not even over yet, and these totals blow previous years out of the water. In 2017, 689 men’s players transferred, the numbers in 2018 and 2019 hit 704 and 694, respectively. In 2019, 648 women’s players entered the portal, and 615 were in the portal in 2020.

Between August 1, 2020 and February 1, 2021, over 1,500 football players were in the transfer portal. For context, only about 1,700 football players entered the portal in the previous academic year.

That the first seven months of the 2020–2021 cycle beat out the entire 2019–2020 cycle shows that athletes have been anticipating this rule change and, for various reasons, desire to transfer. If transfer students are immediately available for competition, coaches will have to adjust their strategy on high school recruitment as well as scholarship and walk-on roster management. We could even see players who were teammates in high school join forces to create collegiate super teams, matching the free agent activity in the NBA and NFL. If athletes know their school might face post-season competition bans, they might then transfer to schools who are eligible for the playoffs. This is a sea change that has been a long time coming, and will drastically change the future of countless coaches and athletes.