A black eye on Virginia Tech
Virginia Tech should be ashamed - and so should other schools who punish student-athletes for moves by the coaches who recruited them.
Tech is in the crosshairs with regard to this because of the school's decision to hold up the transfers of five wrestlers recruited by former coach Tom Brands - who left Blacksburg after two seasons to take over at national power Iowa.
The quintet made up a nationally ranked recruiting class brought to the school by Brands, an Iowa native and four-time All-American at the University of Iowa who won an Olympic gold medal in 1996 in Atlanta.
The grapplers obviously wanted to matriculate at Virginia Tech because of Brands - the same as a gifted writer might want to go to a school to work with a particular English professor, or a budding scientist might want to enroll somewhere to study under a Nobel laureate.
When writers or scientists on scholarship want to leave to follow a professor, they are more than free to do so. So what gives with this embarrassing situation at Virginia Tech?
"The National Collegiate Athletics Association sets forth guidelines pertaining to transfer situations amongst its member institutions. The NCAA has had a transfer rule in place throughout its years. The NCAA transfer rules require the permission of the institution in order for the student-athlete to avoid eligibility consequences. The rule was enacted, in large part, and remains in place to this day, in order to control the unfettered transfer of athletes from one team to another due to a coaching change. Virginia Tech will apply this rule for the purpose that it was intended," the athletics department said in a statement.
If it weren't for the fact that this is negatively affecting the lives of five living, breathing young men, well ...
There's no dancing around this one - this is a black eye on Virginia Tech.
- Chris Graham