This story describes how Miami QB Robert Marve plans to transfer to another school. I’ll omit comments on the prospects of anyone whose name rhymes with “Favre” in order to wonder about this paragraph:
This seems strange to me. On what basis can a college restrict the options of someone who decides no longer to attend? (Among other objections, this seems like rather a blatant and unwonted admission that college football is really a professional sport.)
College football sucks in every way and I don’t watch it EVER but I would guess that this is based on the fact that he may have been at the school on an athletic scholarship that may have had certain conditions upon acceptance, one being the ones you are mentioning. The school certainly wasn’t bringing him there for his brains so losing his footballing is a loss for the school.
Just my two bits.
(FWIW college football is basically high school football with less fumbles. When the QB has a serious chance of being the leading rusher and scoring several rushing touchdowns every single game it just ain’t football to me.)
This is an issue between the schools/conferences themselves. The only NCAA rule is that the player has to sit out a year after transferring–this is designed to eliminate players hopping off bad teams at the drop of a hat or good teams siphoning off players from other teams with no penalty. This rule does not apply for players who have already graduated–remember, counting redshirts, players have 5 years to play 4 seasons (one is the year they sit out as a redshirt). It is not uncommon for players to graduate in 3-4 years and still have 1-2 years of eligibility remaining, so they pursue a masters as well so they can still use up their football eligibility and get an all expenses paid graduate degree. The rule allows these players to transfer so that they can get a graduate degree from a university of their choosing without having to sacrifice their athletic eligibility. The other, more commonly applied rule, is that transfers between divisions don’t require forfeiting a year of eligibility. Joe Flacco transfered from my alma mater, Pittsburgh, down to a division I-AA school, Delaware, so that he could play immediately. These types of transfers happen quite often because the player can play the next season without sitting out–this commonly happens with backup quarterbacks who, with only a few years remaining, realize they will never chance to start with their current team and can’t afford to forfeit a season of eligibility in the transfer.
The issue here is that schools or, more commonly, the conferences they play in agree to rules of their own accord regarding transfers. For instance, players transferring from one Big East school to another are required for forfeit two seasons. This would amount to half of their playing career, so the practical outcome is that nobody ever does it. It keeps recruits from quitting on one team and hopping to a rival. With the one year rule, if the transferring player still has a redshirt season, then his year of sitting out from the transfer is also his redshirt season so no real play time is lost. The two year rule means that at least one full season is forfeited. Schools institute it to protect themselves from players transferring to rivals.
It sounds like this is what the OP’s article is talking about. Miami appears to have agreements with the SEC and other Florida schools in addition to whatever restrictions its own conference, the ACC, imposes. This isn’t the NCAA at work, but the schools themselves.