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Re: Coaches Working using 15-51-7 NCAA rule
Dec 14, 2022, 11:25 AM
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Great. A post you can't read without a subscription.
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Orange Blooded [2160]
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Re: Coaches Working using 15-51-7 NCAA rule
Dec 14, 2022, 11:56 AM
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Can't post the graphics:
There’s a reason why Lincoln Riley has not been urging USC fans to stay patient as he works on his rebuild. He doesn’t need to.
The new leader of the Trojans didn’t wait a year for his first full recruiting class to begin transforming his team. That’s not how it works anymore. He’s trying to construct a College Football Playoff-caliber roster as quickly as he can. His staff has aggressively recruited the transfer portal and taken advantage of a unique loophole to load up on newcomers.
And now everyone else can, too.
The NCAA announced on Wednesday it is waiving the 25-man signing limit for the next two academic years. Oversigning is back. Coaches wanted to be able to sign as many players as they need to replace the transfers they’re losing and maintain an 85-man scholarship roster. More opportunities for high school recruits and transfers to receive scholarships is a good thing. But it’s already easy to foresee what the “unintended consequences” of this adjustment will end up being.
It’s now easier than ever for college football coaches to flip a roster. Eliminating the 25-man signing limit will help coaches freely run off as many underperforming players as they want and replace them with new talent. Giving coaches more flexibility with roster management will bring more transfers and turnover, not less. If that sounds a little too much like we’re heading toward NFL-style roster cuts, that’s not far from the truth.
Some programs have figured out they could already do this. First-year coaches have had an obscure loophole at their disposal in recent years to run off players they don’t want and free up more scholarships. In The Athletic’s story inside the hiring of Riley on Tuesday, Antonio Morales and Stewart Mandel reported that USC’s compliance department discovered a little-known NCAA bylaw that allowed Riley and his new regime to drop 10 scholarship players from their roster this offseason.
The rule they’ve been using — 15.5.1.7 — is known as the “Aid After Departure of Head Coach” bylaw. Newly hired coaches can remove a player from their 85-man scholarship roster but keep them on scholarship as long as they stop playing. A few of those Trojans players who were cut have transferred out, but USC assistant AD for football Joseph Wood told The Athletic that seven members of the 2021 team remain enrolled and on scholarship but are off the roster.
“We obviously forced some of the attrition here,” Riley said.
College football coaches have been able to use this loophole since 2017. Who figured it out first? How many of them have taken advantage? It’s hard to say. These programs aren’t too interested in publicizing their methods for dumping players from their rosters. You’ll mostly hear about it through word of mouth from other coaches. One Power 5 head coach who used the bylaw to drop three players this spring cited several other programs in the middle of rebuilds who’ve done it as well. But if a program hasn’t gone through one of these transitions, the rule might not be on their radar. USC’s administration didn’t know about it until they began preparing for their search.
When the bylaw was first established, its intended use wasn’t to help purge players off college football rosters. The concept arose in 2009 at a time when the NCAA was trying to confront its issues in another sport. The Men’s Basketball Academic Enhancement Group was established in 2007 to develop solutions for the concerning graduation rates and APRs in the sport. That group recommended this amendment, believing it would give men’s basketball players going through a coaching change more freedom to stay in school and graduate. They were aiming to help the players who had two or three semesters left to complete their degree and didn’t wish to transfer.
So 15.5.1.7 was adopted in the summer of 2010 as a men’s basketball-only rule. And it stayed that way until 2016, when the D-I Council’s Student-Athlete Experience Committee proposed that this exception should be allowed in all other sports. That revision went into effect in August 2017. Again, the proposal suggested this would provide more flexibility for student-athletes: “A student-athlete who wishes to remain at an institution to complete his or her degree will be much more likely to be able to do so with the opportunity to continue to receive athletically related financial aid.”
But then came another revision in 2018. The Atlantic 10 — a non-football conference — proposed that the rule should be extended to “a full year after the departure of the previous coach.” Why? Because basketball coaches often get hired in April. The A-10 believed giving players more time to decide on their continued participation was only fair and pitched this as an advancement for student-athlete well-being. The Men’s Basketball Oversight Committee actually opposed the proposal, calling it unnecessary. Football Oversight took no formal position, saying more discussion and research was needed. But every other committee supported it, and it was adopted in May 2019.
Why is it, then, that this has been going on for three years and you’re just now hearing about it? Because the transfer portal made it easy for this practice to go undetected. The people who came up with this rule in 2009 weren’t anticipating how different the transfer landscape would be a decade later.
Here’s how it goes. A coach has a meeting with a player, often at the end of the season or the end of the spring. The player is told he’s not going to get much playing time going forward or, more directly, that he no longer has a roster spot. The coach offers to let them stay on scholarship if they want to quit playing. But he also offers to help however he can if the player wants to transfer to a new school. It’s better for the school if they transfer, because then it isn’t on the hook for their continued education. For the player, entering the portal is usually the move. Most will want to keep playing, and there’s no downside to finding out what other options are out there. Plus, they no longer have to sit out a year as a transfer. Win-win for everybody, right?
With this method of offering to honor the scholarship, a new staff doesn’t have to go through the more scrutinized process of freeing up scholarships through medical disqualification retirements. That was the old way of doing things when a coaching staff oversigned, and it still happens on occasion for players with injury issues. But nowadays, first-year coaches don’t need those justifications to get rid of a player.
Attrition following a coaching change has always been commonplace, and the one-time transfer exception has helped expedite that process. Look at the Power 5 programs that went through coaching changes after the 2019 season. Here’s how many scholarship players they’ve lost to the portal since their coaching changes occurred.
Baylor is the clear outlier there, and player retention is a big reason why the Bears won a Big 12 title in Year 2. But Dave Aranda also wasn’t taking over for a fired coach. He inherited a roster that wasn’t in need of dramatic changes.
Now look at the Power 5 programs that had coaching changes after the 2020 season. They’re flipping their rosters faster.
These coaching staffs lost, on average, 12 scholarship transfers before their first season. Whether those departures were wanted or unwanted, they still free up room for a new staff to bring in their own players. The programs that changed coaches after 2019 averaged just five portal losses before their debut season.
USC has already had 22 scholarship players enter the portal since Riley’s arrival. Washington State has had 18. LSU has had 15. Every other Power 5 program that made a coaching change has lost double-digit scholarship transfers except for Texas Tech (nine) and Miami (seven). But they’re not even halfway through Year 1.
Eliminating the 25-man signing limit will mean larger signing classes for them and everyone else, but it could also normalize programs losing 20-plus transfers each offseason. If a player hasn’t played or developed much in his first few years in a program, why wouldn’t a coach seek a better or more proven replacement? And here’s the difference: Those coaches have no obligation to help the player stay on scholarship.
For years, the concept of ending the signing limit was pitched as a way to help struggling programs like Kansas get back to 85 scholarships. More recently, coaches have said they need this option because depth problems can unexpectedly arise at any time due to the portal. But make no mistake, they’re savvy enough to recognize what this change really means.
The Power 5 conferences made a big show of offering guaranteed four-year scholarships starting in 2015, but college football has become much more transactional since then. This may make some fans uncomfortable, but thanks to the rise of the portal, the idea of “cutting” players doesn’t seem to evoke the level of moral outrage it once did.
Coaches being able to sign as many players as they think they need means more of them can embrace the kind of messaging that Mel Tucker unapologetically used in Year 1 while executing his rapid turnaround at Michigan State.
“Nothing’s set in stone,” Tucker said in November 2020. “It’s compete and show us what you can do and earn your spot, earn your playing time, earn your right to be able to even stay on the team. This is not like a recreational type of situation. This is compete to play, compete to stay.”
Football Oversight already knows this is going to be an issue going forward. They even acknowledged it in the waiver proposal: More roster flexibility “may result in institutions oversigning” and may lead to more players “reporting they no longer have a participation opportunity at their current institution.”
Clearly, these leaders believe the benefits outweigh the consequences. Recruits end up with more FBS options. Coaches get their fix for the challenges of roster management. And the players who get run off can take pride in knowing they helped their program get better faster.
- By Max Olson
May 19, 2022
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Game Day Hero [4554]
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How about a copy and post?***
Dec 14, 2022, 11:27 AM
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