While the federal government is doing everything in its power to bring stability to college athletics, football and basketball continue operating with virtually no oversight.
For basketball, we have seen teams time and again try to load their roster with professional players.
First, it was Alabama adding Charles Bediako to its ranks before multiple court cases ruled him ineligible.
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Now, the LSU Tigers are turning to the pros to bolster their chances at competing for SEC supremacy in Will Wade’s first season back in Baton Rouge.
Football isn’t faring much better, as an unchecked transfer portal and lax eligibility rules are turning a sport that was already playing fast and loose with the rulebook into the Wild West of college athletics.
The NCAA has attempted to curb the free movement of players ever so slightly by closing the spring transfer portal window and creating just one portal period in January, but it was only a matter of time before someone attempted to exploit the new rules as well.
According to On3, UCLA quarterback/wide receiver Karson Gordon is attempting to hit the transfer portal, but not as a college football player.
The redshirt sophomore is reportedly doing so as a scholarship track athlete, though he intends to be a two-sport athlete and play football at his next school.
The NCAA’s track and field transfer portal window just opened this week and will remain open until June 26, and there are no rules that say he can’t participate in both track and football next season.
It’s a brilliant move by Gordon, but also could set a dangerous precedent.
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Gordon was a track and field athlete both in high school and at UCLA, so he has the pedigree to earn a scholarship for another track and field program, but his example will likely try to be copied by many other football players looking for a workaround to the rules in place.
Though this is a new method of skirting the updated transfer portal window, this isn’t an entirely new phenomenon, as the University of Miami tried something similar to work around a scholarship limit back in the late ’90s.
Football players who ran track in high school would earn track scholarships in college, only to “walk on” to the Hurricanes’ football team, with the most notable example being future Pro Bowl wide receiver Santana Moss.
This is one of the reasons I am so pessimistic about anything the government passes with regard to legislation trying to fix college athletics.
As long as there are rules, there will be people trying and succeeding to break the rules.
Implement a salary cap, and programs will go right back to the “bagman” days of paying players under the table.
The genie is out of the bottle in college football and basketball. God help whoever’s job it is to put it back.
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