Airing of Grievances: NIL/Portal

[xubrew]

This is the asinine part. They never said that a Student Athlete couldn't transfer freely, like a "regular" student. They could transfer if they wanted, but would have to sit out a year. "Regular students" that dont play sports would also not be playing a sport the year after transferring.

I dont know why they couldnt peel this apart. 1) All student can transfer, period. Whether you are a "regular" student or a "student athlete." 2) for student athletes, if you transfer you sit out a year. IT IS IRRELEVANT for "regular student."

You arent actually treating them differently. To the extent that they are the "same" (both are students), they receive the same treatment (ability to transfer). To the extent they are different (one student is an athlete and the other is not) there are additional conditional requirements.

It doesnt make any sense to me.

Understand that what I'm about to say is what I understand the legal assessment/advice to be and not my own personal take...

Once the NLRB ruled that student-athletes fit the legal definition of an employee, which I think was they take direction, and they perform work that benefits those they are taking direction from, the transfer rules at the time were considered to be (another) potential violation of antitrust law because it unfairly limited their ability to work. Remember that initially the whole permission to contact was still in place.

Now, I think the other piece to this is they just got sick of dealing with it. It sounds like I'm joking, but I really do believe that one of the reasons we have the portal today is because compliance officers just got sick of all the paperwork and tedium that came with permission to contact. So, they just chucked it all and said anyone can go into the portal and once they're in there any school that wants to can contact them. Done and done. But, the other part to that is that there was a potential legal issue with preventing players from transferring to where they wanted to and playing where they wanted to, and they just decided they didn't want to litigate that. So...they junked it all.