“It’s a bad rule.”
They were talking about the NCAA’s fifth-year transfer rule that is meant to award players who have gotten their undergraduate degrees early but haven’t gotten the playing time they had wanted at their original school.
Instead the rule has become a recruiting tool for major college athletic programs. And it’s the bane of many mid-major schools whose rosters get cherry-picked.
This year, Cleveland State — which fell to 5-13 — was decimated when its two first-team All-Horizon League players from last season, Trey Lewis and Anton Grady, left for other schools thanks to the fifth-year transfer rule.
Lewis, a 6-foot-3 guard who was CSU’s leading scorer a year ago (16.9 ppg.), jumped to Louisville, where he is the Cardinals’ second-leading scorer, averaging 13.4 points.
Grady, a 6-foot-8 center/forward and the Vikings’ second-leading scorer and top rebounder a year ago, plays for Wichita State and leads that team in rebounding.
Three years ago the same thing happened to Wright State when guard Julius Mays, the Raiders’ top returning player, bolted to play for Kentucky.
On the flip side, WSU added fifth-year guard Biggie Minnis this year. He played for Rhode Island last season. And last year the Dayton Flyers took on Ryan Bass, a fifth-year guard who had played at Oakland after a high school career at Chaminade Julienne and Dunbar.
Although Minnis made the academic honor roll at WSU this year and is finding his way on the court after a serious foot injury in the preseason, both feats for which Donlon praises him, the WSU coach admits he’s still against the fifth-year transfer rule.
In reference to Minnis, he said:
“At the end of the day it is a rule and if you can take advantage of it, you do it just like it was used against us a couple of years ago when we lost a very good player.
“But I think a lot of basketball coaches feel the same way and would shut the rule down if they could. But from what I hear and read, it’s driven by football.”
Waters agreed: “Football says it wants it and you know what happens when football is involved.”
While football doesn’t feel the loss of a couple of players on the roster, a basketball team can be gutted. That’s what happened to Waters’ usually stellar program. He lost another top transfer to Michigan State a year ago and another starter from last season went back to Canada.
“I can’t blame the kids,” Waters said. “If a top-10 program comes in and recruits you, it’s hard to say no.”
But it puts the programs that lose the players in a tough situation, especially since the defections don’t come until after the season, in April or, often, May. By then it’s too late to recruit a top replacement.
“The guys who are able to take advantage of the fifth-year rule and leave are usually really good players,” Donlon said. “But while they’re playing for you, you have no inkling that they are going to go. They play 30, 31 minutes a night for you. You can’t go out and recruit that caliber of player in April or May.”
If it hurts the snubbed teams on the court, it often doesn’t end up what it’s supposed to be for the leaving players in the classroom either. They go to a new school under the pretense of getting their master’s degree, but the majority don’t.
“Something like 95 percent of the master’s programs in the country take two years,” Donlon said. “So how many of these guys actually get a degree?”
According to Akron coach Keith Dambrot, that question was touched upon at an NCAA meeting at last year’s Final Four.
“They said it was 30 percent,” Dambrot recently told a Cleveland reporter. “There’s your answer. The system is being used.”
Waters believes that is happening: “I had a kid who’s now going to another school in a degree where he’s literally just taking online classes.”
Donlon had one suggestion:
“They should make the rule like any other transfer rule. Sure you can leave, but you’ve got to sit out your first year. Then you could play.”
That way a so-called student-athlete would be at the school two years and would have time to get the master’s.
“If we were really trying to have something honorable, that’s what should happen,” Donlon said.
He shrugged at that thought and shook his head.
And again, Waters was of the same mind:
“That won’t happen.”
About the Author