Collegiate Basketball Musical Chairs…

Numbers of Transfers is Ridiculous!!!

The game of musical chairs continues this season! The seemingly recent trend of increasing numbers of collegiate basketball transfers, is getting ridiculous. This season we have another long list of transferees (and I thought last years’ list was a long one).

http://eye-on-college-basketball.blogs.cbssports.com/mcc/blogs/entry/26283066/33892727

What the root causes are I cannot yet fathom, but several points are apparent. Recruits / players are spoiled, immature, and evidently believe their press clippings. Far too many of these kids are expecting the world of the universities they choose, for whatever reason(s). Are the coaches promising too much? Perhaps. Are the kids expecting too much? Most likely. Has the high school-Prep School system / AAU circuit spoiled this generation of players? Undoubtedly.

Some of the top recruits are starting on major teams, getting major minutes of Playing Time, are garnering special treatment by the coaching staffs… and they are still leaving “for greener pastures”. Go figure?

Special cases, such as UO’s Jabari Brown, Pitt’s Khem Birch, St John’s Dwayne Polee have had the world handed to them…and the world is not enough? They still left their respective universities. It is beyond my reasoning.

A number of kids were unable to pass academic muster and were deemed ineligible – they are forced to either leave or spend a non-scholarship year trying to improve their GPA’s – in order to try again next year. But it is those who made the cuts, actually suited up and played – in some cases, played major minutes already this season – who are now leaving, having made poor decisions and /or “it wasn’t the right fit”. This generation seems to have no qualms of leaving an institution which has spent significant sums of money to court, recruit, and bring the youngster aboard the program. Loyalty is dead.

What a situation. What a quandry this places on the originally chosen program. Try to placate a highly rated recruit/player or cut your losses and move on with a substantial hit to your teams’ talent quotient. A tenuous situation and generally a no-win for the original school.

I don’t know where this trend is leading? How significant will such a trend become? I do not have the answers, but answers must be found.

If needs be, Conference rules or NCAA rules may have to be changed to stem the flow of these transfers. Kids should know that potential penalties could accrue to their collegiate careers (lost eligibility, longer sit out phases, one transfer per athlete, maximum – per collegiate career, or other suitable rules changes) to reduce/stop the hemorrhaging of talent flows from campus to campus. Conference rule changes will only have area or regional effects…NCAA rules changes are the sole nationally valid changes which can address this issue. Until such organizational changes occur, I fear the talent/university musical chairs game will only get increasingly worse.

In the meantime… Creighton should actively pursue the Pittsburg transferee 6’9″ Center, Khem Birch, from Toronto, CA; as he could be quite the catch in this mid-season reshuffling of the player deck. The Jays have had recent successes with transferees and Birch could be a pickup of the highest magnitude.