tribecalledquest wrote:We've been through this topic a bunch. The transfer rule has not harmed the MVC overall as much as people think or want to think it will. Recently transfers have been a net gain for the league.
And it's on the current coaches to make it a place players want to stay. Stop blaming it all on "poaching". It's not like these players had never heard of bigger schools until they decided to transfer. The decisions are on them - no one else.
While in general I agree that the transfer climate has not been decidedly disadvantageous to MVC teams, I think you're overlooking the general theme we're starting to see across college basketball. We have a system that is now allowing similar player movement as we see in pro leagues w/o the protections teams have at that level. In the pros there are binding contracts and spelled out times when players can move, and when they do, a team is compensated with either money or draft picks to make up for their costs in developing that player to a level where he had value on the market.There are no such built in protections or compensations for college teams. Basically teams at lower levels are incurring all the up front and developmental costs , have no protection, and then get no compensation when a player leaves. Yes the decision is on the player, and yes it's inherent on the coach to try to develop a climate/environment that would induce players to want to stay, but it's naive to believe that this type of system which is stacked now totally to benefit the player and the major programs won't eventually relegate most MM programs to a "farm system" status .
College sports are supposed to be about maintaining a level field for competition, not to support a system for a select few programs to win and dominate the field. Even at the professional level where the goal is totally about that, they recognize it's important to build in systems and safeguards to try to maintain competitive balance, hence they have the draft where lower level teams get opportunity to build with superior talent, revenue sharing and spending ceilings so that a few franchises can't just out spend everyone else, and contracts and specific rules for when a player can make choices about moving elsewhere. We are moving to a system with all the player movement opportunity that is available at the professional level w/o any of the safe guards to maintain competitive balance.
I've noted before the NCAA Tournament is an example whereby all the advantages are in place for the P-5 to get most of the bids, and because the revenue is tied to the bids and then subsequent success of said teams, it simply reinforces the status quo. To me I've always felt that after paying participants expenses, the rest of the pie should be equally distributed across all 300+ teams, which would be a similar form of revenue sharing you see at the professional level. You can't do a draft, but you could also set up a system whereby schools accepting transfers pay a predetermined amount into a fund that then reimburses schools losing players for their developmental expenses. Schools/coaches would have to think a bit before automatically accepting a transfer just as in the pros they have to consider the cost of signing free agents.
Just some thoughts.
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