The NCAA Transfer Portal was initially launched in 2018 and has gone through multiple changes. The one-time transfer rule was repealed in 2021, allowing athletes to transfer once without having to sit out a year. The NCAA adopted transfer windows in 2022 to reduce the number of athletes moving in and out.
As coaches and athletes adjust to the effects of gate transfers on the field, the academic staff is also trying to figure out how to keep up.
How does the athletic department handle an inbound transfer?
If the coach is interested in an athlete in the gate, then the academic employee of the sports department will make a preliminary assessment of this player’s transcript (or transcripts, if this player has attended several institutions).
The evaluation checks how many courses the athlete has taken that will have a direct equivalent at the new school. If there is no clear equalization path, employees must take additional steps to make the decision.
Ultimately, the school, not the athletic department, has the final say on whether or not an athlete can be accepted, as Courtney Skipper, associate athletic director for Arizona State football and men’s basketball, explains:
“There is an academic assessment going on,” Skipper said. But even in this case, nothing is guaranteed. We basically say, “Hey, we think this guy looks good, and they should be good to go here. But it’s not guaranteed until the campus evaluates them, which doesn’t happen until you get accepted to the school.”
How do faculty members deal with increased conversion?
NCAA data showed that more Division I players hit the gate in 2022 than in 2021. According to the athleteThere was an 18 percent increase in FBS Division One football players entering the transfer portal in the 2022-2023 cycle compared to the previous cycle.
As more student-athletes transfer, faculty have to process more transcripts.
“We feel the increased volume of potential transfers and actual transfers to the athletic department. The responsibilities are on the same person as the initial eligibility, but the volume is much greater,” Kentucky Associate Senior Athletic Director Paul Downey told the Academics.
And with the speed at which college athletes move, academic faculty members have to keep up with coaches and recruits for transfers.
“A guy who goes to the transfer gate at 10pm and is already getting calls from coaches by midnight. By 8am I have an email in my inbox with a text, and they’re trying to get it done so they can try to visit him the next day,” said Kim Gross, associate director of the Evans State Kansas Student-Athlete Success Program.
Although athletic staff understand how fast things have to move in college sports, they are sometimes stuck waiting for the school itself to finally confirm the status of a potential transfer.
“(We have to) send those transcripts to campus to be evaluated,” Gross said. “So sometimes the confusing and stressful part is that we have to wait for other people in order to give the coaches an answer as to whether the transfer student will be able to come in and qualify academically.”
New problems with the portal
As transferring becomes more common, some academic faculty say not all student-athletes are fully aware of how transferring will affect their academics.
“So I would say the biggest problem with data reduction is when students realize that not all of their transfer credit has transferred to the next university,” Skipper said. And these student-athletes were not told about the gate. Nobody talks about the fact that no matter where you move to, you’re delaying your graduation.”
Aside from late graduation, a transfer may mean that the student has to give up their original major to go to their new school if they do not apply at the new institution.
“You may not be able to be the same major, especially when you’re later in your career like the seniors. They have large numbers of transfer credits that they have to meet towards a certain degree, and sometimes it won’t be in the major,” Gross said. what you want.
One possible situation to mitigate misunderstandings about the academic consequences of transferring is to have a frank conversation with the student-athletes before they enter the gate.
“I completely understand that student-athletes go into the gate because they want to leave, but we are focused on student services,” Gross said. “Our focus is service and students. So I think if sports advisors can have a conversation with these people who walk into the gate and just say, ‘Here are some common questions you should be asking,’ or something like that, ‘maybe this is what happens next. In terms of academics, “I think this would be really helpful.”
Conversion is not always successful for academic reasons. Former North Carolina basketball star Caleb Love initially committed to Michigan but didn’t have enough transferable credits to clear admissions at Ann Arbor, According to a CBS Sports report. Love ended up committing to Arizona instead.
“If a student comes up[to me about getting into the gate]I always want to have those honest conversations with them because I don’t want them to make mistakes and just say, ‘Well, if you go to this in school, you might lose all these credits and come back after you graduate.'” She may not be in the grade she wants either, “so it puts a lot of pressure on the academic side of her,” said Tatjana Pangeglav, assistant director of athletics for Houston Academic Services.
Although the implementation of the Transmission Gate was not perfect and there were still unanswered questions, the benefits of the Gate were not lost on everyone.
“I think there are still positives to the transfer portal, and I think they can get lost sometimes,” Gross said. “Some student-athletes get somewhere and it’s hard. It’s hard geographically. They’re so far from home athletically, it’s just not how they thought it would work. And so I think there are positives to the transfer portal that shouldn’t go unnoticed.”
The future of post-gate academics
While the full effects of the transfer gate may not be fully realized, there are other factors at play that may influence the academic aspect of college athletics.
The NCAA’s Academic Performance Program (APR) penalties are scheduled to return in the 2024-2025 school year after a temporary hiatus during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The transfer portal has definitely thrown a whirlwind on us. I think a lot of people don’t really understand that APR is still coming back now,” Panjiglav said. “For a few years we didn’t have those sanctions from the NCAA because of COVID. And the students did not graduate and that will affect the programs as well.”
Schools can be affected by the APR if an incoming transfer is ineligible in their major from their previous school and refuses to transfer to a major in which they are eligible.
The standard APR score for a team to avoid penalties and be eligible for the postseason is 930, the same number as before the COVID-19 hit.
Teams that score below the norm will face penalties that encourage a greater focus on academics. The penalties and loss of access to postseason competition will be announced in the spring of 2024, and both will be imposed in 2024-25, the NCAA said on its website.
While the NCAA has not specified which penalties will return, one of the toughest APR penalties has been handed to the UConn men’s basketball team in a decade. UConn lost two scholarships for the 2011-2012 season and was banned from the 2012-2013 postseason.