Back in late April, the long awaited rule change on transfers in college athletics was officially adopted by the NCAA board of directors, allowing college athletes in all sports to transfer once without sitting a season.
A report today shares that the ripple effects of that decision are already being felt, and its on a scheduling front.
Jon Rothstein, who covers college basketball, tweets that "multiple mid-major programs are opting to not play guarantee games against high-major programs because it gives power conference teams a 'free live evaluation' of future players who could move up via the transfer portal."
While he doesn't name football specifically, and it's also unclear whether Rothstein's tweet means games are affected as soon as 2021 or if it's just that schools are hesitant to schedule those guarantee games in the future, there certainly seems to be some scheduling concerns among Group of Five programs.
If basketball coaches are having concerns, its logical to assume football coaches are having those same concerns that could be enough for those in college football to brace for.
There has already been talk about coaches using postgame handshakes to relay how impressed they were with a certain Group of Five player after their game, and that they should have recruited them harder, thus effectively planting the postgame seed with the specific player that if they were looking to transfer they may have an interested suitor as a potential landing spot.
On one hand, if it carries over to football, it could mean we see some really high profile games getting scheduled with Power 5 teams taking on other Power 5 teams, or maybe schools look to the upper tier of the FCS level more, it also means that Group of Five schools could be preparing to take a hit to their pocket books because those guarantee games were starting to go over $2 million for single match ups in recent years.
So what does that ultimately mean for Group of Five schools and their budgets?
Back in 2019, Stadium provided a small peek into the Group of Five budgets by getting ahold what type of money 40 Group of Five programs had allocated to recruiting.
UNLV led that list with just over $500k with Wyoming ($494k), South Florida ($446k), UConn ($432k) and Boise State ($414k) rounding our the top five recruiting budgets for Group of Five schools.
While the top level Group of Five schools will likely be fine, you have to wonder, long term, can the budget of the majority of Group of Five schools afford to take the hit of no guarantee games?
This is the most recent ripple effect to bubble to the surface from the transfer rule change, and something tells me it wont be the last.
Stay tuned to The Scoop for the latest.