The NCAA transfer journey: This genie is not going back into the bottle

PHILADELPHIA — A day before UCLA played UConn for a spot in the Sweet 16, I introduced myself to Skyy Clark, the Bruins’ senior transfer student who grew up in Los Angeles.

As we walked from the interview room to the UCLA locker room, large TVs throughout the building were showing NCAA men’s basketball tournament games in progress. One screen was showing Clark’s former school, Louisville, being trounced by Michigan State.

After beginning his college career at Illinois, Clark transferred to Louisville, where he stayed until his head coach was fired. The 6-foot-3 guard then climbed into the transfer portal and found his way to UCLA.

Later in the day, I was in the UConn locker room speaking with Tarris Reed Jr., UConn’s 6-11 junior center. As we spoke, another big-screen TV was showing his old team, Michigan, trouncing Saint Louis to advance to the Sweet 16. Reed smiled at the suggestion that UConn could meet Michigan next month in the national title game.

“Seeing my old school that I started off with, and being able to play them in the tournament, would be pretty cool,” Reed said.

Such a reunion remains possible. UConn rolled over UCLA 73-57 on Sunday, with Reed chipping in 10 points and 12 rebounds to earn a Sweet 16 berth. His transfer gambit seems to have worked.

What the old guard sees as excess and a system out of control, young athletes see as equal opportunity to pursue their dreams.

“When kids go to a low-major or high mid-major and they play really well there, that gives them a whole opportunity to go to where they wanted to go when they were coming out of high school,” UCLA guard Donovan Dent said after Saturday’s practice. “It’s like a dream for them. Out of everything that goes on with NIL, the upside is that you just get to go play for your dream school. And that’s what happened for me personally.”

Dent began his college career at New Mexico. After three strong seasons in Albuquerque, he felt confident enough to put his name in the transfer portal — with his head coach’s blessing.

“Going to New Mexico was the best decision possible for me,” Dent said. “I love New Mexico to this day. I had a great three years there, and then everyone over there — even my coaches — all understood the new opportunity I had to come here. And no one wanted me to pass it up.”

Clark, Reed and Dent are three of hundreds of young athletes who have benefited from this relative liberation. They are Exhibit A of college athletes who have been largely set free by two major rulings that have allowed athletes to change schools without limitations in pursuit of better sports-related opportunities.

In April 2021, the NCAA Division I Board of Directors ratified a rule change allowing all athletes to transfer one time in a college career and be immediately eligible to play, eliminating the mandatory one-year sit-out period that was long the law of the land for transfers in basketball, football and hockey.

Before the rule change, athletes in every other sport were able to transfer once and play immediately, but transferring in basketball and football — the primary, big-time, income-generating college sports that all of the others rely upon for their very existence — carried additional scrutiny and penalty.

The new rule was liberating, but still restrained freedom of movement.

In January 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice joined the lawsuit against the NCAA’s broader transfer rules, arguing the limitations on transfers violated antitrust law. On April 17, 2024, the floodgates opened. The NCAA Division I Council passed a rule that allowed all undergraduate athletes to transfer and play immediately, provided they meet specific academic requirements. The legislation did not limit the number of times an athlete would be able to transfer and retain immediate eligibility.

From an institutional point of view, athletes’ liberation has thrown the old system into chaos.

Freedom often has that effect on systems that run on exploitation.

Clark arrived at Illinois out of high school with typical lofty hopes of doing great and wonderful things for the Illini. But he had a stressful first year on and off the court.

“My freshman year at Illinois, I had to go home and take care of my pops,” he said referring to his father, former NFL receiver Kenny Clark. “He was really sick; he passed away last year. So, I went home take to care of him, and I want to be a little bit closer to him.”

The pressure of living up to high school hype and taking care of his father took its toll.

Clark left Illinois after his freshman year and transferred to Louisville for the 2023-24 season.

Under the pre-2021 rules, Clark likely would have had to redshirt his first year with the Cardinals. Instead, he frequently led them in scoring as a sophomore. But Louisville went just 3-17 in ACC play, finishing last in the conference, and coach Kenny Payne was fired after the season.

Without the 2021 and April 2024 rulings, Clark would have been stuck, at least limited. Athletes in his position were often stuck as their school hired a new coach who ran off unwanted players.

Instead, Clark finally made the decision to leave. UCLA and coach Mick Cronin came calling, and he jumped at the opportunity.

“Louisville, we had a rough year that year, and the head coach ended up being fired,” Clark said. “I didn’t know who the coach was going to be, so I gave it a month to see what they were going to do. I wasn’t really hearing anything. And so, I entered the portal. I knew I wanted to come home.”

Reed’s transfer journey was different.

Coming out of Link Academy in Branson, Missouri, Reed selected what he thought would be his dream school — Michigan, coached by Juwan Howard.

After two years, however, Reed had not lived up to expectations, and Howard was fired after a last-place Big Ten finish in 2023-24. That was Reed’s first exposure to the business of big-time basketball.

“It was tough on me mentally,” he said. “Michigan was my first college I chose coming out of high school. I felt so attached to the University of Michigan, the people, family, friends. Coach Howard recruited me there. I felt so close, connected.”

After Howard was fired, Reed hit the portal and landed at UConn, where he has blossomed and proven something to critics.

“I feel like a lot of people doubted me in my college career,” Reed said. “I came in a top-30 recruit, and I didn’t pan out like I wanted my first two years in college. So, I was coming here knowing that I had to be humble, had to be coached, and was going to a place where I didn’t know what I could even be. So, all credit to the coaching staff — believing in me and buying into me.”

The vast majority of transfers are like Reed’s UConn teammate, Malachi Smith: They simply want to play on a larger, more prestigious stage.

After graduating from St. Raymond High School in the Bronx, New York, Smith went to the University of Dayton. With a year of eligibility left after spending four seasons at Dayton — suffering a knee injury that limited him to one game in the 2023-24 campaign — Smith made the leap to a higher level of competition. He landed at UConn.

In the past, mid-major programs such as Dayton were often able to compete with larger programs because they kept a team together for three or even four years.

The unfettered transfer rules have turned such mid-majors into minor leagues for larger Power Four programs. When a mid-major player becomes polished, he jumps into the portal for a better opportunity on a larger stage.

Smith admitted he needed his “minor league” seasoning at Dayton to be ready to excel at UConn.

“I learned so much at Dayton that it kind of made me into the person I am. So, I wouldn’t trade it for anything else,” he said.

Smith, who averaged 9.3 points and made 29 starts for the Flyers as a freshman, laughed when asked whether he was ready to play for UConn coach Dan Hurley in his first year of college.

“I was not ready, not as a freshman,” he said. “I wouldn’t have been able to do it, just being young, emotional, just a lack of maturity. As a freshman, coming in at 17, 18, I don’t think I could do it.”

Among the college sports fan base, there remains a lingering and deeply rooted nostalgia for the good old days, and an equally deeply rooted feeling that young players should be grateful for having an athletic scholarship.

This sense of expected gratitude forms the foundation for exploitation: The university should be able to make money from athletes and not have to pay for it.

For a number of coaches who spent the majority of their careers under the old system, the new system is hard to take. Some coaches have resigned rather than accept the new reality, and some coaches such as Marquette’s Shaka Smart have tried to resist transfer hunting.

Smart once said that bringing in a high volume of transfers would “stunt the growth of players already in the program and create a contradiction in a culture that values internal development.”

In February, Smart, who saw his team miss the NCAA tournament this year, said Marquette was “absolutely evolving and will be open to using the transfer portal this upcoming offseason to improve the team.”

As Mick Cronin said Saturday: “You either change, or the university will change you.”

Tied directly to the liberating transfer portal is the equally liberating NIL (name, image and likeness) legislation that allows schools to compensate players — often richly — for selecting their programs.

The movement toward paying players began in 2019, when California passed legislation that, starting in 2023, prohibited schools from punishing athletes who accept endorsement money while in college. That was the shot heard around the world.

In 2020, the Supreme Court ruled against an NCAA argument that the organization should receive special antitrust treatment because of its academic mission. The high court’s ruling made it clear that the NCAA restrictions, especially on NIL activity, could face serious future legal challenges.

A year later, the NCAA’s Board of Directors adopted a temporary rule change that opened the door for NIL activity. The NCAA instructed member institutions to set their own policies for what should be allowed. That same year, the first state laws, as well as the NCAA’s new rules, went into effect and athletes began signing endorsement deals.

The reality is that the NCAA should have taken care of this years ago, when lucrative TV deals became the norm. Administrators with vision should have listened to coaches such as Cronin, who warned that pay for play was on the way.

When I asked about this Saturday, Cronin said, “We’re holding onto rules from a long time ago and trying to work it into today, because it all happened and nobody was prepared, because the NCAA stuck their head in the sand for so long.”

Instead of anticipating changes and adjusting, stakeholders — including head coaches, athletic directors and boosters — had no problem profiting off of the athletes’ free labor and using the money to compensate coaches. The adults in the room preyed on the athletes’ sense of gratitude and a “free education,” even though so many star players were not getting degrees.

The sudden market correction with NIL and unlimited transfers was a long overdue idea, but the execution has been largely taken place without regulation.

As sociologist Dr. Harry Edwards observed during a recent conversation: “This was something that I think is a great idea, but like most great ideas, once it expands, that expansion could very easily turn into a situation that has metastasized, which means that it’s out of control.”

In some ways, big-time college sports are in a state not dissimilar to the Reconstruction era, which was the period of U.S. history following the Civil War. Reconstruction, which saw the advancement of rights for Black Americans previously confined to slavery, was met by harsh backlash, and that backlash may be coming — or at least attempting to come — to college sports.

In March, President Donald Trump initiated the formation of the “Saving College Sports” roundtable. The commission was formed to address the financial and regulatory landscape of college athletics, with a focus on NIL rules. The co-chair is former Alabama football coach Nick Saban, a vocal critic of the unregulated pay-for-play system.

Saving college sports, for some, means rolling back the progress made by athletes and “making college sports great again.” That could very well mean going back to a time when athletes had no rights and were expected to be grateful while generating money for their respective institutions.

Asked about the Saving College Sports committee, Edwards observed: “The same people who were not paying athletes, [who were not] compensating them justly for the millions of dollars that they brought into these institutions, are in control of NIL. So, what we have is a management problem, not a fundamental issue of athletes being compensated.”

This battle will be compelling to watch.

In an equitable system, you cannot restrain trade. The courts have said as much. The Justice Department has ruled as much.

There are interested parties who would like to roll back time, but this is a golden age for players, and the genie is not going back into the bottle.

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