While the stench from the Baylor University basketball miasma surpasses offal-dumping in the nearby Brazos River, Big 12 Conference poohbahs continued to hold their noses wishing the smell would go away.
Rather than risk additional unwanted publicity over the reek, league fathers decided to waive the rule regarding intraconference transfers.
When the Big 12 Conference set up shop in the mid-1990s, it loftily announced that any student-athlete who transferred from one league school to another would not only have to sit out one year under NCAA regulations, but also lose a year of eligibility.
So when former Baylor players John Lucas and Kenny Taylor wearied of wearing nose plugs in Waco and transferred to Oklahoma State and Texas respectively, the NCAA proclaimed that the two would not have to sit out a year, and the Big 12 quickly chimed in by announcing neither would lose a year of eligibility.
The Big 12 Conference, incidentally, did not reach its decision arbitrarily. Commissioner Kevin Weiberg conducted a conference call with a quorum of the league’s faculty advisers, including Don Green of Kansas University.
Green, a professor of petroleum engineering who once dug a dry well in the Luke Axtell case, concurred with the consensus to waive the transfer rule in the case of Lucas and Taylor.
“There was a fair amount of discussion, and the faculty reps felt it was such an egregious case,” Green said, “that basically we would provide a blanket waiver for Baylor’s players.”
I’m not saying the Big 12 decision-makers were right or wrong in what they did. I just think it’s a stupid rule in the first place. Why should a conference have the right to penalize a student-athlete if he wants to transfer from one league school to another?
No doubt the rule was put into place to prevent a player from transferring from a have-not school to a traditional power and adversely affecting the balance of power. But can one or two players really make that much of an impact? Certainly not in football and not in basketball unless that player was a superstar … and superstars don’t go to tradition-poor schools in the first place.
Axtell is an example of this stupid rule. Regarded as one of the top freshmen in the Big 12 in 1998, the 6-foot-8 Axtell was the focus of a postseason brouhaha involving an assistant coach revealing his academic status. No doubt feeling the pressure of playing in his hometown, among other things, Axtell decided he wanted to transfer to Kansas. The Jayhawks were coming off a 35-4 season and most people, KU fans included, believed the acquisition of Axtell would guarantee more championship seasons.
Yet because he was transferring within the league, Kansas would have the services of Axtell for only two years instead of three. Axtell would have to sit out one season under NCAA rules and lose a year of eligibility under Big 12 rules. Axtell accepted that penalty, perhaps in part because he thought he would turn pro after three years anyway.
Kansas appealed, however, saying the circumstances made Axtell’s continued stay in Texas untenable and that he should not be denied a year of eligibility. But Kansas lost the appeal for a waiver and it wasn’t even a close vote.
“I got creamed,” Green said.
Still, Green agrees with the league decision to go easy on the Baylor players.
“In all fairness, (Axtell) was not as serious a case as this one,” Green said.
Serious is serious is serious, and the Baylor case is serious. But the Big 12 rule stipulating loss of eligibility for transferring within the league is arbitrary, prejudicial and, to my way of thinking, mean-spirited toward the student-athlete.
Same goes for the NCAA rule forcing Division I-A football and Division One basketball players to sit out a year if they want to transfer. That rule doesn’t affect baseball or volleyball or swimming or any other non-revenue sport. Only the revenue sports.
It’s bureaucratic bunk that has been on the books for too long and needs to be junked. But you know how the NCAA is. For every rule revoked, two others take its place.
