His feelings on the matter strong, Tom Izzo couldn't resist.
"I don't want to get into a lot of controversy," he said Thursday on the Stoney & Jansen Show, "but I will."
The matter at hand was the NCAA's decision to allow student athletes to transfer multiple times without restriction, which is expected to be formally approved next week. Izzo said everyone he talks to about it, from fellow college coaches to agents in the pros, disapproves.
"When you can't find one person who thinks it's a positive, I'd say it's probably a bad rule. So I am totally disappointed in the NCAA and the transformation committee, which will probably get me in trouble. But when you don't talk to coaches and people in the streets, that'd be like making new medical rules and not taking to doctors," Izzo said.
A year ago, the NCAA approved immediate eligibility for one-time transfers. Now student athletes will be able to transfer as many times as they want without having to sit out a season. Izzo has long opposed free transfers (barring a coaching change) on the grounds that it gives student athletes an easy way out, that it teaches them avoid adversity instead of confronting it.
"I feel bad for our student athletes," Izzo said. "People are going to say, 'Tom Izzo is old-school and Tom Izzo wants to protect his program.' Listen guys, I don't need to do that. I'm at a stage in my career where the only thing that matters to me is the same thing that mattered at the beginning. I've been for the student athlete the whole time."
Izzo fears that as the NCAA allows student athletes to make "decisions that maybe at the time they're not capable of making, I think you're going to get more kids making bad decisions."
"I'm worried about the kids," he said. "So is everyone else. You wouldn't sit there and tell your own son as a freshman in high school, 'Do whatever you want, whenever you want, and come home whenever you want.' Sometimes as the coach, the parent, the adult, we have to help kids, and this is letting people help kids who maybe don't truly understand the circumstances and consequences."
In his 40th year in the Michigan State basketball program and his 27th as head coach, Izzo also fears this: "It's going to be damn near impossible" to get student athletes to graduate. Every time they transfer, they risk losing credits.
"If you go to Michigan and you transfer to Michigan State, you're going to lose hours. If you go to Michigan State and you transfer to DePaul, you're going to lose hours. If you go to DePaul and you transfer to Northern Michigan, you're going to lose hours. If anybody thinks it's going to help the graduation rate, it's going to teach you how to fight through adversity, it's going to give you the opportunity to fail and then recover like we all have to do -- and there's a million other unintended consequences with this."
Izzo said more than 250 men's basketball players entered the transfer portal last year and failed to land a scholarship -- "and this year I bet it will be worse."
"It's just insane what the NCAA and the people that are making these rules have done, without coaches being involved in any way shape or form," Izzo said.
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