One more transfer story

This, because it encapsulates the mindset of major college athletics perfectly:

… [Oklahoma Athletic Director Joe] Castiglione said that not every transfer request could be resolved the same way because of “the uniqueness” of each case. Et cetera.

Afterward, Castiglione took questions from a small huddle of reporters who wanted him to tell the story of how he had lured Oklahoma’s basketball coach, Lon Kruger, from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, in 2011. Castiglione, who is an entertaining storyteller, told a long tale about how he had approached Kruger a number of times and finally persuaded him to agree to the move, even though Kruger and his wife had just moved into their dream house in Las Vegas. (It helped that Castiglione gave his new coach a seven-year, $16.6 million contract.)

When I asked Castiglione about the transfer rule, he told me that Oklahoma tried not to stand in the way of athletes who wanted to leave. But he also brought up the case of Baker Mayfield, the Sooners’ current quarterback, who walked on to the Texas Tech team as a freshman, then transferred to Oklahoma, where he walked on to its football team, too. Mayfield not only had to sit out a year but also lost a year of eligibility because of a Big 12 rule that punishes players who dare to move to a different college within the conference. The fact that Mayfield didn’t have an athletic scholarship made no difference.

Although Castiglione made it clear that he thought transferring should be easier for the players, he also worried, he said, about “people tampering with our current student-athletes to get them to transfer.”

The reason I say perfectly is because I doubt Castiglione even recognized the contradiction in the two situations as he spoke.