“I talk to kids all the time, and I very rarely talk to kids who think the current environment is good for them.” Charlie Baker · Pivot Podcast

All right. So this was like, you know, your first question, Ryan, about, so what was like the transition for you? One of the first things that happened when I got this job was, which was in the spring of 23, we got a phone call from West Virginia. We said they were going to transfer in a basketball player who is transferring for the third time in three years. And at that point in time, the rule was transfer once, play right away, transfer more than once. You know, you got to basically catch up on your progress to graduation, and then you can play after you do that. Which seems to be what everybody wants the rule to be now. It's kind of ironic. So we say to them, this kid's transferring for the third time in three years. He's nowhere near where he needs to be on progress to graduation. You know, we'll see what happens with the committee, but it's probably going to be a pretty steep hole to climb. And they kind of implied that if we didn't give the kid the opportunity to play right away, they would sue us. So committee does the work, concludes that it's third transfer in three years. Kid's got a long way to go in progress to graduation. He really needs to sit for a year and catch up on his academics. The Attorney General in West Virginia sues the NCAA in federal court, along with nine other attorneys general and the federal justice department. All over this one student athlete. And we said at the time that we had real concerns about what this was going to do to academic continuation, team culture, all the rest. And they were like, everybody gets to transfer every year, period. So that's where we landed. And the crazy thing to me about it is I have a lot of people who say to me, why isn't the rule you transfer once, play right away? If you transfer again, it's got to be and play right away. It's got to be because your coach left or somebody in your family died. You need some kind of exigent circumstance. Otherwise, you should probably work on catching up on your academics. Because we do have data that's starting to come in that shows the more times you transfer, the less likely you are to graduate in four or five years. But right now, that's the federal standing that we all have to operate under. And it's one of the things that gets fixed in the Protect College Sports Act, which is it goes back to the transfer once, play right away. Transfer again, it's got to be and play right away. It's got to be because something happened. But I talk to kids all the time, and I very rarely talk to kids who think the current environment is good for them. Because the inability to create culture and continuity or to know who you're going to be playing with next year is a problem. But the other thing that's a problem is you have so many kids who have pressure on them. Literally, you know, two, three weeks into the season, they got people starting to gnaw on their ankle about where are you going to play next year. And I've talked to plenty of coaches and plenty of kids who said to me, you know, I didn't want to leave, but people were just all over me that I had a better opportunity if I left. Sometimes that turns out to be true. A lot of times it turns out not to be true. And one of the things we're going to try to try to do about that, and we're still working out some of the bugs technologically, is we're going to try and put a universally available website up that will have what actually happens to everybody who enters the portal. Because I think there's a tremendous amount of misrepresentation going on, primarily with third parties and others who are saying to kids, you know, if you get in the portal, we can get you a much better opportunity somewhere else. I would love that student athlete to be able to, you know, go online and say, let's see what happened to the guys I played against last year who were kind of like me. Where did they land? How much are they playing? Because there's just a lot of misinformation floating around in that space. And I think many kids are making what I would describe as decisions based on what they're being told that turn out not to be. Somebody's just collecting bodies, right? So they get them and then see if they can figure out where to land them. And if they can't, eh, they don't really care.