Can we go back?

Here we are again with another football season finished and playoffs and bowl games on the agenda. Once again we see players opting out of playing in their team’s bowl game for fear of an injury. And now there is another issue for teams preparing for the post season and that is the Transfer Portal. For the Marshall University Thundering Herd they opted out of their bowl game due to lack of numbers. After a highly successful season their head coach took another head coaching position and 36 players, 29 on scholarship and all three quarterbacks put their names into the transfer portal. Without the ability to safely put together a quality football team the Herd said no to the extra game.

The transfer portal is having an influence on a lot of football programs and it makes college football more like pro sports with the ability to make money through Name, Image and Likeness or NIL, and big name schools a chance to pick off players by recruiting during the season. I remember when that was a way to be out on probation from the NCAA.

Schools like WSU and Oregon State can recruit a kid out of high school but that doesn’t guarantee that the kid will finish out his eligibility there. If they have a good season there is a chance that they may not be attending that school in 2025. The NIL money is enticing and the chance to play for a big time program with more publicity and the possibility to go to the NFL is a big attraction.

Fill in Cam Ward’s name here. Ward had one offer coming out of high school and that was to play at FCS level Incarnate Word. When his coach was hired by WSU he made the transfer to Pullman. After two good seasons at WSU, Ward transferred to the University of Miami Hurricanes and was a finalist for the Heisman Trophy where he finished fourth in the balloting. Now it certainly was a good decision for Ward to leave Pullman but it can never be said that he was a Coug for life by any means.

WSU had 15 players enter the transfer portal the first day. EWU has several transferring as well. Several of last year’s Big Sky champion basketball team are now wearing WSU uniforms instead of EWU. There were a lot of teams that had to fill out rosters utilizing the transfer portal. Oregon State had 46 transfers if my memory serves me right. This certainly looks more like what a professional coach would be dealing with. When a player signs on to be scholarship athlete he doesn’t have to commit for an entire career and that is what makes college coaching difficult there days. No wonder they ask for multimillion dollar contracts for 5 plus years. And because coaches move on for big name schools and paydays it’s no wonder that the college athlete wants some of the actions since they feel they are being strung along by the school and coaching staff.

The NCAA used COVID 19 as an aid to get players whose team may have shut down a season when several players came down with the virus. So they gave these kids a chance to play somewhere else without having to sit out a year and then gave everyone another ‘COVID’ season of eligibility. With a red shirt year, COVID, and a medical red shirt a player could have been able to play 7 seasons and not necessarily at the same school. I’ve been amazed to see how many of these kids that have played at four or five different schools. I hope their credits were all transferable or does it really matter anymore.

I look back on March 16, 2020 and remember that we were going to take a two week shutdown in order to get a handle on the soon to be pandemic. We were told to mask up, stand six feet apart and lock ourselves inside. How well did that work? There were kids in this state that missed out on their senior prom, spring sports seasons as well as a total screw up of 2020-21 athletics. And now we sit and wonder what our favorite college team is going to look like next year or even at the bowl game. At my age it doesn’t matter as much anymore but I can still vent and I will.

There once was a better way but I don’t think we can go back to it now.

— Dale Anderson is a sports columnist from Ritzville. To contact him, email [email protected].